Iñárritu's Digger: Stale Satire, Tom Cruise at Full Throttle

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger, a climate-change satire starring Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed, opens in theaters on Friday, October 2 — and according to The Film Stage's review, it raises urgent questions about art under billionaire ownership without satisfyingly answering them.

The film arrives in a cultural moment its reviewer describes with acid precision: two years into Donald Trump's second term, a former cabinet member declared comedy "legal" again, while networks pushed lightweight comedians off the air to align themselves with the administration. Digger circles questions of how future generations will process the troubles of our times through art, "considering the billionaires holding the purse strings." The review's verdict: the film raises those ideas less to explore them than to fuel "a more invigorating post-viewing conversation." The reviewer imagines that David Ellison — not yet in control of Warner Bros. — would shrug off this satire of the right-wing ruling class even if it landed on his desk.

Iñárritu has explicitly asked critics, in every press invitation, not to reveal the film's central conceit — a request the reviewer wryly calls "maybe the first case of a director willing an F Cinemascore upon himself." Without spoiling it, the reviewer found the hidden aspect "far less interesting" than the shenanigans teased in the trailer, concluding the film resembles "a post-apocalyptic Birdman." When it isn't in that thoughtful register, it mimics Dr. Strangelove — with a broadness of tone that makes Peter Sellers' Nazi-saluting German scientist "look subtle."

The premise, as far as it can be described: Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate whose decades of drilling in Greenland have produced ecological fallout — an ice shelf 400 feet high and approximately the size of Washington, D.C. (nicknamed Judy) heading toward mainland Europe. Ahmed's scientist Ganesh has long warned of the impact, which could trigger a tsunami killing hundreds of thousands and displacing more as the continent floods. John Goodman's President declines to act on Ganesh's projections and instead deploys an AI to ban contentious words — from "ice" to "Al Gore" — on social media. It was that or nuke the iceberg.

Cruise anchors the film. The reviewer, self-described as "allergic" to the actor's Tropic Thunder stylings, was "pleasantly surprised" that Digger Rockwell channels the tragic egotism of Frank T.J. Mackey from Magnolia, complete with a show-stopping monologue in which he paints himself a savior from the ills he himself causes. The climax — Digger's impassioned speech to booing members of the European Parliament about how his company supplies their "freedom" — unintentionally echoes, per the review, the far better Foghorn Leghorn courtroom monologue in last month's Coyote vs. Acme.

Cruise and Ahmed "both locate the right tone for the director's brand of over-the-top dark comedy," working best when bouncing off each other. The rest of the ensemble fares worse. A well-cast but badly utilized Goodman plays a character written as if his curse words were the jokes themselves; the film "threatens to become a tiresome edgelord shock fest" each time he reminds someone he has "cancer of the asshole."

The review's central charge is belatedness. Dr. Strangelove and the comedies of Mel Brooks took real cultural anxieties — nuclear fallout, the Holocaust — and were "first to the punch," setting the tone for how comedy approaches trauma. Digger isn't even the first star-studded climate-change comedy this decade, though the reviewer ranks it "a major improvement over the hectoring condescension of Don't Look Up." There is "funny material and precision-focused comic performances" here, but "contained within a movie already resigned to not having anything new to poke fun at."

Visually, the film swings harder. Cosmo Sheldrake's score oscillates between whimsical and "Hans Zimmer-style booms of orchestral sound"; each set is drowned of color, with Cruise's pale make-up occasionally blending him into the walls of his palatial mansion. Returning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot the desaturated palette in VistaVision — a bold decision the reviewer calls "a big swing that pays off."

That payoff, though, is the exception. The review closes on the film's central paradox: its "admirable satirical boldness appears further devoid of insight the more removed one gets." Audients can judge for themselves when Digger reaches theaters on October 2 — the real test of whether a satire this broad can land in a culture already saturated with its targets.