‘Digger’ Devolves into Smug, Sanctimonious Satire

Comedy is hard. It’s even harder when you don’t know how to tell a joke. Similar to 2021’s exhausting, unfunny Don’t Look Up, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new movie Digger wants to be a satire about the dangers of global warming while lacking the specificity and vocabulary to articulate those concerns in a thoughtful way. Like other Iñárritu movies, there’s a surplus of style over substance with no symbol so blunt and obvious it can’t be used to bludgeon the audience. Rather than utilize Tom Cruise’s intensity for precision, Digger does little more than fit him into its loud, blaring cacophony of clumsy social commentary. Images of a stuffed and mounted world speak volumes, but Digger is too self-satisfied to let any moment land. Instead, it blasts caricatures and long speeches at the audience in an awkward dance of both seeking a laugh while also reassuring you that there’s something to say.

Digger Rockwell (Cruise) is a wealthy oilman from a line of oilmen, and he pretty much runs the world. When one of his drilling projects cuts loose an ice shelf and sends it hurtling towards Scandinavia, the sickly President Compson (John Goodman) seeks Digger’s advice. While Digger’s head scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) lays out all the scientific fallout, Digger, Compson, and Compson’s cabinet are too stupid and bullheaded to care. Digger says they should control the media narrative and ensure that no one knows about the worldwide disaster that’s about to unfold. As climate change accelerates due to Digger’s oil projects and callousness, he takes center stage in a world where the biggest catastrophe may be one man’s ego.

Iñarritu is correct that there’s nothing wrong with being loud and grotesque in your satire. Sometimes the best approach is to play your characters as so idiotic that we circle back to some smart observations. When South Park was at its best, it could be as juvenile and sophomoric as any comedy but would still come around to some sharp commentary on various hypocrisies and social shortcomings. Almost every character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a bumbling fool, unaware of their own sociopathic behavior, but we laugh because when the stakes are so high, we can connect more with the themes through comedy than drama. Strangelove is almost a remake of Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, and while that’s a great film in its own right, Strangelove has a bigger footprint because a scathing joke lasts longer than a serious polemic. 

But Digger wants to have it both ways. It doesn’t have the confidence of going full Strangelove, embracing the foolishness of these characters and letting the chips fall where they may. Like Don’t Look Up, the writers felt the need to include right-thinking characters who will serve as mouthpieces for their own frustrations and fears, which takes all the oxygen out of the picture. It’s very nice that Ganesh has all the science at his disposal, and you could argue that no one listening to him is the point, but it still allows the movie to pause dead in its tracks for long monologues about climate disaster and the negligence of the oil industry. Kubrick knew his audience would get that nuclear war is not only bad, but that these apocalyptic tools were in the hands of the worst people. He didn’t need Lionel Mandrake to pontificate about the dangers of nuclear annihilation.

The movie also can’t stop relishing its own sense of superiority with a reveal that comes roughly 35 minutes into the story. Since the trailers haven’t shared what that reveal is and there was even a little note before the screening saying, “Please don’t spoil what’s to come,” I’ll talk around it. What I will say is that despite the visual cleverness on display—and Iñarritu, along with his three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, knows how to make some memorable compositions—these scenes only further push characters into service as blowhard orators of the film’s various ideas. And at that point, you’re not engaging in a conversation or even using art for expressive purposes. You’ve created a very expensive PowerPoint presentation that happens to star Hollywood actors. Ińárritu never believes his audience will get there on their own, and his underlying contempt for everyone helps explain why Digger is such a toothless satire. 

A big selling point in the marketing has been Tom Cruise’s “return” to working with a serious director on a serious subject after doing almost nothing but action movies for over a decade, but his performance here is as much a stunt as hanging off the side of an airplane or scaling the Burj Khalifa. I don’t think Cruise wants to be seen except within the narrow box of execution, as if acting is judged the same way one would evaluate a gymnast. The vulnerability that powers his best performances in movies like Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire is as absent as when he’s saving the world as Ethan Hunt. Digger Rockwell may be a greedy, bombastic ignoramus, but for Cruise, he’s largely hiding beneath makeup and a drawl. And it’s not to say that Cruise can’t excel at such a caricature, as he did when he played Hollywood executive Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. But Ben Stiller and screenwriter Justin Theroux know how to be funny while Iñárritu and the smattering of writers who worked on Digger do not, so you’re mostly left with Cruise playing to the rafters. He’s doing a lot, but like with the surrounding movie, that tends to be more exhausting than exhilarating.

Perhaps that’s because ultimately its view of climate change comes down to lazy doomerism, the kind of middle-of-the-road, thoughtless evaluation that hasn’t done any real research into its subject matter. Strangelove plays as effortless because Stanley Kubrick was such a meticulous planner and researcher. Digger feels like the work of people who have glanced at headlines over the years and, in the decade of development for this project, didn’t bother to see the gains in solar power or consider how past efforts were able to defeat threats like acid rain. That’s not to brush aside the immediacy of climate change, but Digger wants to say there’s blame to go around, not just on greedy oilmen like Rockwell and craven politicians like Compson. It’s a very Mister Gotcha approach, one that doesn’t consider who has power, who doesn’t, and then shrugs because it mistakes cynicism for wisdom.

In the past, Ińárritu has been able to get some views to confuse grandiose visuals and audacious subject matter to see his movies as possessing some sort of wry profundity. I assume that’s why he has two Best Director Oscars. I see him as simply trying to be the loudest voice in the room, coming at the audience with big performances done in close-ups and long takes. But if you scratch the surface of his movies, there’s little to interrogate or unpack because the characters tend to announce the themes and ideas in the clunkiest dialogue possible. It doesn’t help that with Digger, Iñárritu draws comparisons to stronger movies like Strangelove, or even more recently, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Those are filmmakers who understand comedy, and their movies recognize that to get a laugh you need to trust that the audience will get the punchline. Instead, as usual, Iñárritu remains content to sneer at the world, comforted in his sense of artistic ambition regardless of how shallow its subtext may be.

Digger opens in theaters on October 2.