Digger is a movie about contradictions. It is sincere and ridiculous. It is earnest and cynical. It is about how art can heal us and distract us. It’s about how individuals are powerless and complicit. It’s about how villains are guilty and convenient. It is about perception and reality. 

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s newest film is the subject of much discourse, with viewers torn between loving and hating it, and between thinking it means one thing versus another. It’s messy, abrasive, loud, ridiculous, and unsubtle. Sometimes I rolled my eyes at it; other times, I was brought to tears.

It’s hard to find the words to describe how I feel about Digger and which side – because there certainly are sides – I fall in. But one thing is for certain – I cannot stop thinking about it. 

This review contains spoilers for ‘Digger.’

The film follows Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), the most powerful man in the world, as he embarks on a frantic mission to control the narrative around an environmental disaster he’s unleashed through his oil empire and greed. 

The film is obviously a satire of our current society and world leaders, and it isn’t subtle about it. Each character feels more caricature than human – grotesque, loud, and self-important.

Cruise throws himself into the character in typical Cruise fashion, transforming his voice, body, and mannerisms into something both physically exhausting and mentally draining to watch.  As Digger, he is somehow both profoundly idiotic and intelligent enough to wield his power. 

John Goodman takes the absurdity to new heights as Compson, the President of the United States. He is surrounded by a posse of men who uplift his madness until he begins to see himself as the divinely appointed leader of the free world, delivering a number of unhinged line readings that will almost certainly become new vocal stims. 

The closest thing this world has to a voice of reason is Riz Ahmed’s Dr. Ganesh. Ganesh is Digger’s stressed environmental advisor, who grasps onto his crumbling morality while refusing to examine his own culpability in the system he condemns. His vocal objection is to all the action he seems capable of taking.

The performances keep the film entertaining even when its dialogue gets under your skin. Each performer bounces off the others, creating a world where everyone yells over one another and adds nothing valuable to the conversation. It’s all just noise. Sound familiar? It is increasingly ridiculous and increasingly accurate. Sometimes, even gratingly so.

Digger spends a majority of its runtime satirizing our current era. Some of the jokes land; some make you roll your eyes. But truthfully, none of this is what stayed with me after the movie ended. The movie really hits its stride when it turns its attention away from the people destroying the world and toward those trying to make sense of it all. 

Everything described above is actually all a theater production of “Fossil Fools,” a cult classic retelling of a historical apocalyptic event that occurred twenty-five years earlier. Cruise is actually playing Curtis Markson, an actor portraying Digger Rockwell onstage. The story of Digger we thought we were watching is actually scenes from the play, reinterpretations of history that have been exaggerated and altered.

We are watching the creation of a satire unfold. 

This structural maneuver is the film’s greatest asset and its biggest risk. Digger works best when it’s not about Digger Rockwell, but the production backstage. Interrogating itself and the play-within-the-film’s own purpose. 

As Curtis, Cruise truly excels. The exaggerated performance – and accent, thankfully – slips away into someone so incredibly normal, which feels exceptionally rare to see from Cruise at this point in his career. After years of watching Cruise play “Tom Cruise, the Last Movie Star,” it is startling and comforting to remember what made him Tom Cruise in the first place – a gifted actor. It’s refreshing to see him portray doubt and insecurities with just a teary-eyed look.

There is an irony in Cruise playing an actor who plays a character obsessed with controlling the narrative and public perception. In the play-within-the-film, Digger’s instinct to repair the damage he has caused is to control the story around it rather than find a solution to stopping it. When you control perception, reality gets lost. It becomes easier to turn away from Tom Cruise the person and focus on Tom Cruise the actor. 

This idea of perception and reality runs throughout the film, not just in this casting choice. 

In a pivotal scene, Curtis questions the truth behind the scenes he is performing, pointing out that, in reality, Digger wasn’t present for the moments they are depicting on stage. The play’s producer, Kenny (Jesse Plemons), argues it doesn’t matter. In a sublime moment, Plemons’s Kenny describes the first time he saw “Fossil Fools” and how it became a space for communal healing. People needed to laugh, to cry, to roar at the people and decisions that led to the world’s downturn. It does not matter how the events actually played out or what the reality of the situation was; only the audience’s experience and how they perceived it. 

Some audience members may hear this and think that is the core thesis of Digger. Stories can save us! They can heal! This is Iñárritu’s point!

But that interpretation feels too straightforward for a film so invested in contradictions.

While Kenny claims his desire to share this story is to provide a space for individuals to comprehend this catastrophe, he is also mimicking his uncle’s footsteps by controlling the narrative around his family, directly shaping the cultural memory of his family and this disaster, shifting people’s recollection of the event through this perception of the stage production. 

This then makes you wonder: what is the culpability of the performers putting on this satire?  Suddenly, Digger is no longer a film satirizing our times but a satire of satires. 

This is what makes Digger so much more interesting than a simple satire about evil billionaires and politicians; it is interesting because of what it says about art and its role in our world. 

How we shape and tell a story influences our perception and makes situations that should be intolerable tolerable. Look at this powerful billionaire, aren’t they so cringe? Look at this horrific event; wouldn’t it make for a funny Saturday Night Live sketch? Look at this elected official, aren’t they to blame for all of the world’s problems?

The film interrogates how we, as individuals trying to survive in this hellscape, use art to turn away from the reality around us. As Digger himself points out in a blistering speech, you cannot externalize all accountability onto one convenient villain. We turn to art to heal us, and in doing so, it can distract us, reshaping our perception of reality until absurdity becomes the new norm as we grow more and more numb to it. But we still need art to give us catharsis; we need those who wield the power to finance stories to do so, even if it means reshaping our perception of reality.

By the end of the film, the play concludes. What Kenny foretold comes true – the audience erupts into applause, tears, and roars, communal healing. Even I, sitting in the theater, was moved by this as a celebration of storytelling. Stories matter! Art brings us together! 

But then a warning plays, a reminder of the apocalyptic world they live in. They leave the theater and return to the reality around them. Art can give us hope. It can also give us an excuse to feel hopeful without changing anything.

Some may view this ending as anti-art, but I disagree. There is power in what art can do to the individual – giving us hope to survive, the ability to cope through difficult times. This matters! But it can not stop there. 

Perhaps that’s exactly why there is so much conversation around Digger – audiences are unable to sit with the fact that it is both sincere and cynical in its perception of the arts. You must acknowledge both sides, despite the contradiction.

This is what makes Digger an important film for our times. We cannot leave the theater and become complacent about our reality. In a time when art has become conflated with activism, Iñárritu reminds us that movies will not save us. Not even Digger.

We have to do that ourselves. 

Review Courtesy of Kam Ryan

Feature Image Courtesy of Warner Bros