(Above: Tom Cruise and Sandra Hüller in Digger (2026). Image via IMDB).

By M. Faust

At a late point in Digger, the new film from Birdman and The Revenant director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, one character says “It’s funny, and it’s scary, and it’s stupid and it makes no goddamn sense.” He’s talking about the story we are watching, and it’s clear that Iñárritu, winner of two Best Director Oscars, wants us to take the comment as self-referential. (This movie is nothing if not meta to the nth degree.) 

Any discussion of Digger has to start here: its plotting makes it impossible for the conscientious reviewer to talk about the movie in any kind of depth without indulging in spoilers. Let’s just say that if you have seen the trailer and expect to get a black comedy starring Tom Cruise as a devil-may-care oil tycoon who has to save the world from an ecological disaster his company has unleashed, that’s not the movie you will be seeing. Thirty minutes in, something happens to make you reevaluate everything you’ve seen up to that point. And that’s only the first time.

Arguably, one might also start from the fact that Digger has been proclaimed one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. These accusations started to appear on the day the movie was released, based on the Thursday night advance screenings, only to pick up steam over the weekend. (The days of a movie opening slowly and building an audience are long gone.) The film’s production and marketing costs come to between $250 and $350 million, but its opening weekend worldwide box office was about $20 million. 

The schadenfreude in a lot of the industry reporting is misleading. The Associated Press, for example, referred to it as a “critically panned satire.” There is no lack of critics who hated it. But just as many liked it, with a lot in the middle who found it intriguing but bewildering. And audience ratings on websites like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic hover around a respectable 70% positive.

Of course, that is the opinion of the few who saw it. Moviegoers didn’t so much dislike Digger as simply ignore it, which is not what Hollywood expects for a movie starring the actor who may be the last Movie Star, someone whose name puts butts in seats regardless of the vehicle. Given that the trailer was designed to make the film seem a lot more audience friendly than it is, I have no idea what caused this massive apathy. 

I have now seen Digger twice. The first time I was caught up in its radical shifts, its dark satire and its relentless self-dissection. But as someone who has seen way too many movies over the years, I have learned that a film that dazzles the jaded viewer with its originality may really be all frosting and no cake. Looking at it the second time knowing what tricks it was going to pull, I felt that Iñárritu and his co-writers, aside from giving several of their characters speeches that pointedly summarized the dangers we face from decades of environmental abuse, had no final point to offer other than, “Get ready for it because we’re all fucked.” (Was that their intention? Beats me.) 

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to enjoy here. Digger recalls the apocalyptic satires that the British turned out in the late 1960s, most of them resounding flops (anyone remember The Bed Sitting Room?) It refers openly and often to Dr. Strangelove, particularly in the scenes featuring the US president (John Goodman in a grotesque but funny performance) and his cabinet. (It was even filed in the same location as Strangelove, England’s Pinewood Studios.) 

Cruise’s character is, I think, meant to remind us at times of the aging Charles Foster Kane in his Xanadu. A lot of the tone seems to come from Yorgos Lanthimos, especially Bugonia. Along the way I was also reminded of A Few Good Men (Cruise gets a speech that is very much in the mode of Jack Nicholson’s famous “You can’t handle the truth!” tirade), Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Iñárritu’s own Birdman, and the 2024 flop The End, which was also about an energy billionaire fighting off the evidence of his crimes.

It’s worth seeing even if you don’t like it. Just make sure and go with someone who likes talking about movies, because you’re going to want to compare opinions with someone.