The world’s most powerful man embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything.
If Alejandro G. Iñárritu is your type of filmmaker, and his movies, “The Revenant,” “Birdman,” and “Babel,” to name but a few, are your cup of tea, then going into “Digger” will be an eye-opening experience. In a good way? In a bad way? That’s hard to say, since the experience will be subjective. Having seen “Digger,” I can say it is not the sort of film I would ordinarily seek out, but reviewing movies requires a willingness to engage with unfamiliar or challenging material on its own terms.
What I can say about “Digger” is that it has already sharply divided critics, and will probably do the same for audiences. Someone asked me about the film the day after the press screening I attended. It was almost impossible to sum up the entire movie because the film’s biggest plot twist arrives about twenty minutes in, which makes it hard to talk about or critique without giving away the very development viewers should discover for themselves.
The story centers on Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an ultra-wealthy, unhinged billionaire Texas oil tycoon with aggressive drilling operations worldwide. Despite repeated warnings from his anxious chief scientist, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), about a widening crack and methane leak at his Arctic outpost in Greenland, Rockwell presses forward. That is, until the rig subsequently explodes, calving a city-sized chunk of ice that begins drifting on a catastrophic collision course toward Europe.
In the aftermath, Rockwell refuses to take responsibility, blaming Mother Nature and telling his people this happens every day. He gets himself invited directly into a White House crisis meeting chaired by the unwell President Compson (John Goodman) and his cabinet. Government officials and military brass cycle through absurd fixes—including a plan to nuke the iceberg and stage an AI-powered media blackout—while Ganesh tries to serve as the film’s ignored moral compass. In the end, Rockwell goes on a bizarre offensive, weaponizing media spin not against the oncoming iceberg, but against its potential victims.
Like James Cameron and his AVATAR movies, Iñárritu makes his environmental message unmistakable throughout the two-hour runtime. This is one of the film’s most divisive elements, as it repeatedly insists that climate change is real, destructive, and impossible to ignore. Near the end of the movie, Rockwell’s rant takes the blame off people like him, wealthy oil tycoons, and lays it at the feet of the everyday common folk, who have no choice but to participate in the system, forcing them to confront their own addiction to oil-fueled lifestyle choices. It will almost certainly inspire debate.
As a film critic, we were asked to avoid spoilers, which makes a complete assessment difficult. Discussing the film’s central revelation would allow for a fuller analysis and cast much of what follows in a different light. While the film is contentious, to say the very least, the one aspect I can most certainly highlight is Cruise’s performance. His Digger Rockwell—complete with heavy jowly prosthetics, a paunch, and a thinning white hairpiece—is the film’s one indisputable highlight. His previous three acting nominations, “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Magnolia,” each represented some of his finest work, with Cruise even going through physical transformation for his portrayal as wounded Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July.” In “Digger,” though, he takes that commitment in a more excessive, theatrical direction and delivers the loudest, boldest, and most uninhibited performance of his career.
As Cruise marks his 64th birthday this year, he has nothing left to prove and little interest in restraint, so he throws caution to the wind and gives “Digger” his all. He gives a wildly unhinged, transformative, and polarizing performance. Instead of his usual heroic stoicism, he struts, swaggers, swears, and boasts. For the first time in a long time, I forgot I was watching Tom Cruise. A ten-minute showstopper of a scene sees Cruise deliver a fiery, unbroken monologue defending petroleum before a frustrated assembly of EU delegates, filmed in one continuous take. That shot was impressive both for its technical execution and for Cruise’s bombastic performance.
“Digger” is a movie that you will have to experience for yourself. And if you do decide to go, you will understand why the early twist makes it so difficult to discuss in advance. It completely changes the overall perspective and asks the audience to reconsider what, exactly, they are watching.
In Theaters Friday, October 2nd
