Given the kind of movie Digger is, it would be impossible to discuss it in any kind of depth without going into spoilers. I seriously suggest you see this movie in theaters while you still can before reading the rest of this editorial. Just a fair warning.
Yesterday, October 14th, was apparently the last day my local Regal was showing Digger, the latest movie directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, his first since Bardo in 2022 and his first Hollywood production since The Revenant in 2015. The production budget for Digger is estimated to be between $125 million and $180 million, at least part of which can be attributed to its all-star cast: Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, and others. I brought up the date at the beginning of this paragraph because Digger only entered theaters on October 2nd. That’s right, Regal kept this movie in its theaters for not even two full weeks. It looks like AMC will keep Digger for another week, but probably no more than that. Between its production and marketing budgets, the film would have to make at least $300 million just to break even for Warner Bros., although Paramount (it’s a long story that I don’t feel like getting into) is looking to inherit WB’s money troubles anyway. All told, the worldwide gross for Digger will ultimately amount to… maybe $50 million. The result is unquestionably the box office disaster of 2026, and that’s not including the sharply divided critical reception.
Digger is one of my favorite movies to come out this year, even if I was all but predisoposed to love it, given I have a Letterboxd account and a blog. Some 528,000 people have logged this movie on Letterboxd, with a pretty respectable rating of 3.9 (out of 5), while on IMDB it has a no less respectable rating of 7.5 (out of 10), albeit with only about 35,000 IMDB users having logged it. We can infer a few things from these figures, maybe the first being that IMDB is no longer the major online hub for moviegoer input that it was way back in the early 2010s. Letterboxd has long since overtaken IMDB as the site of choice for cinephiles, especially people my age and younger. Another thing (and this is really funny) is that of the 528,000 Letterboxd users who’ve seen Digger, seemingly very few of these people have seen it in any given theater. My own theater at my local Regal was completely empty (barring myself) when I saw the movie, and from what I can tell this is a common experience. You would think, going off of social media buzz and word of mouth, that more people are seeing Digger; yet the theaters continue to be deserted. Even some celebrities (Anne Hathaway, Hideo Kojima, Neil Young [of all people], among others) going to bat for Digger has had no tangible effect.
In a way, the game was rigged from the start. The trailers for Digger drew mixed reactions, even if some were excited at the prospect of Tom Cruise starring in an auteur-driven production for the first time in many years. The big problem with these trailers, aside from their content, is that they ended being a pack of lies. The movie Digger is marketed as is not the movie Digger actually is, and this has been a headache for both the marketing team and those who review movies for cash. Now, let’s assume for a moment that film critics count as people. As of right now, Digger has a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 53%, with an average rating of 6.10 (out of 10). Even some of the reviews tagged as “fresh” read as ambivalent, and curiously both Jacobin and National Review gave it negative reviews. The problem every one of these critics has had to reckon with is the fact that the logline (basically the elevator pitch) we got for Digger (going by its marketing) is a ruse, and as such it’s impossible to review the damn movie without at least giving away the first major plot twist. Most Hollywood movies don’t dare anything this audacious in the first place, but while such a rug-pull would be enough for most, such is merely the beginning with Digger.
The first half-hour or so of the movie, in which we’re tricked into thinking Digger will be something “normal,” more or less goes like this: Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise under to a good deal of makeup, such that there are later points in the film where he becomes unrecognizable) is an aging oil tycoon who seems to have emerged straight out of the plains of Texas circa 1950. Backed by the US government, even being good friends with President Compson (John Goodman), Rockwell’s company has taken to drilling for oil in Greenland. Unfortunately a crack about five feet in length forms in the ice at one of these oil rigs, methane bursting forth from underneath, and before you know it that crack’s become a lot bigger than “just” five feet. Soon we’re dealing with a runaway ice shelf, split off from Greenland and heading towards Europe, with the slim possibility of it turning into the Atlantic and melting. Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, who, and I mean this as a point of praise, looks and acts like he had wandered off the set of a Wes Anderson movie by mistake), the local climate expert, gives a detailed prediction of what would happen if the ice shelf were to hit the mainland. The prognosis is bleak.
Going off of the movie’s first act, you’d be forgiven for thinking this will be an obvious if also quirky satire of “the system’s” failure to combat man-made climate change; certainly there are valid holes poked in the fabric of American society. Maybe the funniest and most on-point bit of satire comes from Goodman’s Compson, an elderly and increasingly feeble man suffering from “cancer of the asshole,” who’s due for surgery in the midst of the ice shelf crisis. Compson’s condition deteriorates over the course of the film, at times becoming delirious and ultimately being wheelchair-bound and hooked up to oxygen. Despite Compson’s obvious impairment, nobody suggests invoking the 25th amendment. This might hit a little too close to home for some people. Also unsurprising is the fact that Compson and at least some of the people in his cabinet are Christmongers, and that their appealing to the Bible is shown to be at least somewhat performative. Again, intentionally or not (Iñárritu has said the germ for Digger came about way back in 2015), the satire here threatens to come too close to real-world politics. There’s also the question of whether such a movie can sustain itself for the whole two-hour runtime.
Well, there’s good news and bad news—the latter specifically for film critics who have to talk/write about this movie. A mishap with a fake tree reveals that everything we’ve been watching up to this point is actually a performance—a high-budget stage production of Fossil Fools. We’ve been watching Digger the movie, but also a rehearsal of Fossil Fools the play. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, but he also plays Curtis Markson playing Digger Rockwell. Digger’s exaggerated mannerisms and attire are part of the play’s satirical bent. Of course, an observant viewer will notice certain oddities about the “film” right from the opening shots. We’re introduced to Digger with his bedroom curtain rising up the same as a stage curtain, and the exterior backgrounds look like obvious matte paintings. Most of the film’s first half-hour takes place in one location, with actors going in and out of doors like the sides of a stage. Digger’s beloved cat looks like an obvious animatronic, and indeed it is an animatronic. Mind you that I went into Digger with this first major twist spoiled for me in advance, but somehow this knowledge didn’t make the first act any less enjoyable, nor did I feel any less gleeful with that fake tree fell over. Picking up on the movie’s willful artificiality is part of the fun.
Evidently the rug-pull has not worked its magic on everybody, not least because, on top of being a black comedy like the marketing indicated, Digger is also science fiction; it might also be the most compelling piece of climate fiction, regardless of medium, to come out in recent years. What seems at first to be a cross between Don’t Look Up (apparently Netflix turned down Iñárritu’s offer to work with them like with Bardo because they found Digger too similar in its premise to Adam McKay’s 2021 movie) and Asteroid City (speaking of Wes Anderson) is actually one of the most intellectually and emotionally bewildering mainstream movies to come out in a very long time. I say “mainstream,” just because of the cast and studio backing, but Digger might be even more primed for cult-classic status than the equally bewildering The End of Oak Street from just a couple months ago. (Oh yeah, I also wrote about The End of Oak Street.) A key difference, however, between these movies is that The End of Oak Street should’ve been easy to sell to the average moviegoer, whereas Digger‘s premise is too layered and high-concept to do justice in a two-minute trailer, never mind that its metafictional aspect is supposed to be kept a secret.
A lot of negative reviews decried Digger as being pretentious, relentlessly bleak, accusatory, unfunny, unfocused, and what have you. Whether the movie is “unfunny” really comes down to the viewer’s own sense of humor and one’s ability to take the film on its own terms. Now, accusatory? I’m not so sure. The now-famous ten-minute monologue (all captured in a single take) Digger goes on in front of the European parliament, in which he both admits to his company’s recklessness and accuses his audience (but not the audience watching the play, I think is the important distinction here) of being equally complicit in the global climate’s decline, gets often removed from context or taken at face value—sometimes by people who have not even seen the movie. Make no mistake, this extended monologue is an impressive turn from Cruise, being the film’s centerpiece and the single strongest argument for his earning a Best Actor nomination come awards season; but what’s even more impressive, from the perspective of having seen the rest of the movie, is how Iñárritu and his co-writers are able to contend with the long history of climate fiction, turning these worn-down conventions on their heads through a combination of execution (consider the sheer grayness of the audience’s outfits in contrast with what Digger is wearing) and context. It’s a movie less about how we should save the Amazon and numerous endangered species and more how we are already living in a world where said species will likely have gone extinct just a decade hence.
Digger is not a revolutionary film because of how self-reflexive it is; hell, it’s not even the first “self-aware” sci-fi Hollywood production to come out this decade (see the aforementioned Asteroid City). It’s not an “important” movie. There’s no call to action, and it’s unlikely any one of the few people who’ve seen it in theaters will become a climate activist or eco-terrorist. But that’s also a point (not the point, since like with virtually all great works of art it has multiple facets) the film is making. Art is not proactive, it is reactive. There has never been, at least to my knowledge, a single case of a work of art invoking revolutionary change; even the closest to an example I can think of, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, failed in its mission statement to help make democratic socialism a viable political movement in the US. Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary (in terms of their filmmaking) movies about the success of Soviet socialism were indeed made years after the revolution ended. Fossil Fools, the play within the movie, is a scathing indictment of those in power some thirty years prior who had the chance to avoid disaster and refused; but this play, too, ultimately functions as no more than catharsis and entertainment. The moment “to do something” has already passed. Digger‘s ending, the specifics of which I dare not give away here, is a slyly metafictional statement about our relationship with art and the world we have already inherited.
I’ve seen some uncharitable takes claiming Digger is “anti-art,” which is an absurd notion. If nothing else, this film is a hell of a theatrical experience where everyone involved clearly gave it their all. Iñárritu will continue to make movies, although whether he’s able to stay in Hollywood after Digger‘s historic bombing is a different question. I can’t help but think of that famous line from Joan Didion’s The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Art is not activism, and believing in it hard enough will not save the world; yet at the same time we do need it. We need art like how we need food, water, and shelter. Once I got around to seeing Digger, after reading about a lot of critics’ misgivings with it, I was surprised by (among other things) its lack of bleakness regarding the necessity of art. “Movies will not save us.” So? Neither will clean drinking water and a balanced meal; yet we still need those things. Digger is not the best movie to come out this year (I have a few gripes with it myself), nor is it the “most important,” if only because such a label implies a capacity for real-world utility art simply doesn’t have; but it’s that rare work of challenging and forward-thinking speculative fiction that somehow infiltrated the mainstream.
