TOM CRUISE IN DIGGER
An on-screen disaster about environmental disaster
I'm not sure who to feel sorry for with this one. Not Tom Cruise, because everyone agrees he works very hard and puts in a respectable effort in the titular role, in a remarkable transformation into, let us say, a loud, boorish version of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. The chief secondary roles, though, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemens, whose one speech is a key monologue, must have cause for regret. What's the opposite of burnishing your image? Fogging it. The images on screen during a screening of Alejandro González Iñárritu's long advertised DIgger actually look foggy.
The topic is important: environmental breakdown, the irresponsibility of the fossil fuel industry - and writers' inadequacy at dealing with those. The writing is bombastic. The film style is inexplicable. Or maybe it's bad Lanthimos, Poor Things without the panache and bright color. The look is the first turnoff. That never goes away. The film hits upon its doomed plan and sticks to it.
The color is drab. The background music is noisy, throbbing, and distracting. The use of fish-eye lenses, which in Poor Things creates a surreal excitement, just makes you feel like you're looking out of a fish tank. About 30 minutes into the film, a major narrative twist reveals that the hyper-stylized story of Texas oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is actually an elaborate, multi-set, broad satirical stage play titled Fossil Fools. So Tom Cruise isn't playing a boastful old fool of an oil magnate, but an actor playing a boastful old fool of an oil magnate. Is Alejandro González Iñárritu only pretending to be a talented Mexican director? Is this saying political satire doesn't work anymore or that his pretense of talent was a sham all along?
We're told - part of the trouble: so much telling and so little showing - that the real Digger Rockwell was a complex person and this satirical version is a cartoon. Unfortunately, we in the audience are seeing only the cartoon. Here is a "play" - a movie - that tells us it is hollow entertainment. Unfortunately we get that. Only we're not even getting the entertainment part, because it's third hand.
The final reveal, that this play performance, shown in a very artificial way, has been going on in the context of a post-apocalyptic city, where the streets the audience members walk out into run with dreck. This of course winds up looking even more artificial than the lengthy material laboriously enacted by Mr. Cruise & Co. Maybe if Mr. González Iñárritu had had the good sense to change the look from the color-drained brown-gray fish-eye look to a bright natural look, the eco-disaster present would have given the audience a final jolt, instead of just making us thankful it's all about to end. The only good touch is the audience members donning high tech breathing masks to leave the theater; but this is rather wasted because it is not emphasized enough.
A minor quibble: it's a good idea to make your main characters look different from each other. In the gray fog imagery the heavily made up Tom Cruise and John Goodman (as the American President Compson), as two bulbous, gray old men, are easy to confuse with each other. At least put a hat on one of them, or a white suit, or something.
On the plus side: there are times when the grandiose theatrical imagery of the stage spaces are awesome to look at. After all, though misguided this time, Iárritu is working with his brilliant dp Emmanuel Lubezki again here, the ace cinematographer who was so brilliant in Alfonso Cuarón.'s Gravity. It's an interesting device to mix stiff bewigged manakins with live extras in the audience - belying the eye's desire to detect CGI. Jesse Plemons does deliver his monologue well and this time, with him, there's one speech in the film that can be clearly understood, important since, in a sense, it's the most important speech.
Probably one of the biggest box office disasters of the year, this is certainly one of the biggest artistic ones. David Rooney of Hollywood Reporter calls this a "shallow satire insufferably pleased with itself." I hope you see it, if you will, in a theater. Theaters need the money, and it's a film whose look, such as it is, is utterly dependent on being enjoyed on a big screen. in an excellent, vivid YouTube pan, paying tribute to the great career of Tom Cruise but calling Digger "criminally unfunny," James Hancock comments: "I'm thrilled that so many talented actors got so well paid for this movie, but I suspect that by the end of the year a few executives over at Warner Brothers are going to be publicly beheaded for ever allowing this movie to be made at this scale," Which was $180 million; Hancock points out you don't need to spend a lot of money on a comedy.
Confession: though he's saved by the fact that I may confuse the great Mexican directors of his generation, I've really only totally liked his first feature, Amores Perros, which I liked very much and was an important film, and introduced the movie career of Gael García Bernal, to be followed by the triumph of Y tu mamá también with both Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. I struggled to admire Iñárritu's Birdman in the 2014 NYFF, but it can be appreciated as a tour de force on several levels. The Revenant, which I suppose you could call a tour de force for Leonardo Di Caprio, is a tedious workout for the audience - which goes for this latest project even more. This time there is the lingering shell of the much more interesting movie we imagined looking at the poster for Digger for months before its disappointing revelation.
Digger 129 mins., premiered in the UK Sept. 22, 2026 and in Mexico Sept. 29. It released in the US Oct. 2, 2026, when it was screened at CInemark Richmond CA for this review. Metacritic rating: 4̶5̶%̶ 46%.