Digger (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

By: Nick Zednik

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s (Birdman, The Revenant) Digger is the kind of blockbuster Hollywood fears, yet can’t seem to stop making: wildly expensive, unapologetically ambitious, and far more interested in creating discussion, whether that’s admiration, frustration, or somewhere in between. Starring Tom Cruise as oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, the film follows a larger-than-life billionaire whose carefully constructed world begins to unravel as his immense wealth and influence collide with an escalating environmental crisis. Iñárritu swings for the rafters from the opening minutes and rarely lets up, cramming the film with commentary on climate change, corporate greed, political corruption, and the world’s increasingly complicated relationship with entertainment itself. There is no shortage of ideas here, but the film is less interested in delivering the ideas subtly rather than throwing them at a wall and seeing what sticks. The film works as both an audacious piece of filmmaking aiming to subvert expectations at every corner yet, an exhausting exercise in self-importance. As the saying goes, “two things can be true at once”, as is the case with Iñárritu’s latest spectacle.

Tom Cruise (Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning) steps away from the death-defying blockbusters that have defined his recent career, allowing himself to lean fully into character work again. Cruise is completely committed to the madness. Buried beneath prosthetics and adopting an exaggerated Southern persona, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell as a larger-than-life caricature of wealth, power and unchecked masculinity. Deliberately excessive, but beneath the bluster there are moments that reveal why Cruise remains such a compelling on-screen presence decades into his career when given the opportunity to move beyond the action-hero persona. Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal, Nightcrawler) provides some of the film’s most grounded and surprisingly funny moments, while John Goodman (The Big Lebowski, Argo) and Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest) embrace the heightened tone with equally theatrical performances. The rest of the ensemble is intentionally broad, one that will be an acquired taste. While the constant shouting and larger-than-life caricatures leave little room for character depth, the commitment to the film’s deliberately artificial world at least delivers consistent unpredictability throughout.

Behind the camera, Iñárritu is operating at full capacity. Emmanuel Lubezki’s (Gravity, The Revenant) cinematography gives the film an enormous, almost operatic visual scale, while the production design makes virtually every frame feel meticulously constructed. The direction is bold, restless and unmistakably Iñárritu, particularly in the film’s increasingly meta approach to storytelling. The concepts at play are equally ambitious. The film isn’t just interested in climate change, but humanity's complicity in the systems that perpetuate it, the entertainment value of catastrophe and our tendency to demand that art confirm what we as consumers choose to believe. There is an intriguing idea buried underneath all the spectacle: satire can expose uncomfortable truths, but also become another form of performance. Unfortunately, the film sometimes seems so determined to explain its ideas that it forgets to let them breathe.

The screenplay will undoubtedly be the most divisive element to comprehend. Filled with many twists and turns, which were shockingly hidden throughout the film’s marketing rollout, the increasingly unconventional structure and philosophical ambitions will either strike audiences as daring or frustratingly self-indulgent. The willingness to take enormous swings deserves credit, yet the satire isn't consistently funny and the messaging often grows too heavy-handed. That split feels appropriate because the film is fundamentally a film about contradiction: it wants to criticize spectacle while creating spectacle, challenge audiences while lecturing them, and use absurdity to address very serious issues. Digger doesn't always make those contradictions work, but it is difficult to accuse the film of playing it safe. Whether Digger works or crashes and burns ultimately depends on how much patience viewers have for a film that would rather invoke discussion than provide an easy answer.

Nick’s Pick: 6.5/10 Digger is far from a conventional blockbuster, delivering a wildly ambitious experience that will inevitably create conversation. Iñárritu and Cruise deserve credit for swinging for the fences, making its ambition difficult to ignore.