Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, starring Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed, is a dark comedy about climate change, political corruption and humanity’s indifference to environmental catastrophe. While the film initially plays like a satirical disaster movie, its ambitious metacommentary turns the story into a critique of cinema itself and its limited power to inspire real-world change. Tom Cruise delivers a standout performance, but Iñárritu’s heavy-handed messaging ultimately undermines the film’s impact.
Year after year, a lot is said about cinema. How it has the power to influence people’s lives. How it can diagnose the society it's made in. How it can bring about a change in society. How profound it is as an art form. How it’s the pinnacle of storytelling.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu would know a lot about this. Just ten years back, Leonardo DiCaprio walked on the Academy Awards stage to accept his first Oscar for the Iñárritu-directed The Revenant, and somehow linked the movie to climate change. Et voila! What is the topic of Innaritu’s first English movie after The Revenant? Climate change.
The catch here, however, is that Digger is not just about climate change. And I will take a moment to appreciate the trailer for not revealing the plot, so when you walk into the theatre and realise what’s happening, some twenty minutes into the film, it feels nothing less than surreal.
On the surface, Digger is like a retelling of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. An unrecognisable Tom Cruise plays a third-generation oil baron, Digger Rockwell, whose constant thirst for more oil profit sets off a colossal glacier headed straight into Europe.
Now, our baron Rockwell is like any stinking rich, know-it-all boomer. Yet somehow, he seems to be the lesser evil once you are introduced to President Compson (John Goodman) and his ministers. Compson is a dig at a certain United States president in his actions and his predecessor in his ailments. Ultimately they’re all the same, and their bloated egos and constant blame game makes them take all the decisions environmental scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) begs them not to.
Riz Ahmed, fresh from his other black comedy, Bait, does a brilliant job as this scientist. He’s a young brown man trying to talk science to rich white gerontocrats who only understand profit and loss. As the story’s designated moral compass, it’s hard not to miss the twitch in his fingers and the crack in his voice as he stands up for what is right. But the bureaucratic machine that he lives in is so vast and so intricate that one cog going bad does not do anything to change things for the better.
The undeniable star of the movie is, of course, Tom Cruise. It’s hilarious to see him parody the powers that be as Digger Rockwell, but the moments where he breaks character to be someone else are truly sublime. It’s in these moments that the cynic playing the role of Digger comes out, and this man has both heart and soul. It is a bait for the Oscars(don’t miss that ten-minute long monologue Digger gives about deflecting blame), but it’s so immaculate it makes you crave the good old days when he was a drama actor, not the ageless action star Tom Cruise.
Yet all this effort turns on its head when Jesse Plemons walks onto the set, quite literally. He is the ultimate touch of meta in the movie, that final scratch that tears through the surface of the silver screen and glares right at the audience. Convincing though he is in his nihilism, his performance is marred by the hubris with which the writers think they must nail the message into your head, lest you fail to understand.
And this one scene becomes the downfall of Digger. Iñárritu tries so hard to build a movie about climate change and corruption that the stakes disappear into thin air when the metacommentary is added in the climax. Maybe this would have worked in 2020, when everyone was losing their minds over how meta their film could be. But Digger never needed a metacommentary; real-world news was enough to do the job. Take, for example, the scene where the cabinet reacts to the news of ten thousand people being displaced in Europe. Just one month back, some thirty-seven thousand were uprooted by the Nepal floods. You just know how the cabinet would react to that news.
In fact, Digger is so close to reality that its attempt at science fiction (bless production designer Dennis Gassner's sets and sound designers Richard King and Johnnie Burn) feels like a farce. You are underwhelmed by the grandiose intellectuality in the climax. After a point, you can’t help but wonder if Iñárritu is too full of himself or is too disgusted by his art and its consumers.
And so we circle back to all the profound things that are said about cinema.
With the metacommentary added in, Digger finally, is a movie about cinema and media as a whole. About how a few crumbs of bread and some good circus can keep people complacent about everything going wrong around them. How cinema has spent decades warning audiences about the dangers ahead. How, after the seven-minute standing ovations and “critical acclaim”, very little changes on the ground.
Except that they shove this nihilism so far down your throat that ironically, the best example of the film's message is not in the movie, but in the very ineffective cigarette advertisement that plays before it.
In Tropic Thunder, another movie about cinema (also starring Tom Cruise as the very Digger Rockwell-esque producer, Les Grossman), Robert Downey Jr's award-winning thespian Kirk Lazarus has a piece of advice for fellow actor Ben Stiller's Tugg Speedman: never commit fully to a role. If you're playing someone with down syndrome, portray them as someone with a very mild degree of the syndrome. The Academy and the audience never likes to be shown the full truth anyway.
Digger does the opposite. Iñárritu and his team commit fully, almost begging on their knees for the audience to stop and look at what is happening around them, much like Dr. Ganesh does throughout the film.
Except, unlike the young scientist, Iñárritu seems to know that his movie won't change anything. You'll go watch the movie in theatres if you like your social satire to be spoonfed to you. You'll clap at it, compare it to Dr Strangelove, call it good cinema, and go ask ChatGPT to generate a review about it for your social media intellectualism.
He probaby also knows that maybe beyond a few acting wins, he won't get anything at the Oscars next year. It'll be a joke on the Academy if they hand him and his writers the award, and a proof of his "genius" if they don't.
Who cares anyway?