Digger is one of those movies where you walk out of the theatre not entirely sure whether you liked or hated it. I’m reasonably certain, however, that I won’t forget it. That contradiction feels right for a filmmaker like Alejandro González Iñárritu. Somehow, the film has managed to keep one of the biggest twists of the entire year under wraps. I remember watching the first trailer for Digger and immediately thinking that the film was going to divide audiences. And thus spoke the prophet: it turns out I wasn’t far off.
Digger has been marketed as a comedy, and yet I can’t say that it’s a particularly humorous movie. The villains are cartoonish, the performances exaggerated, and if you watched the trailer and dismissed it as “another climate change movie that’s going to lecture its audience,” you could hardly be blamed. Normally, you might even be right. What is surprising about Digger, though, is that it assumes greater sophistication from its audience than its blunt satire initially suggests. Everything seems obvious until the film eventually reveals what the joke actually is.
Without revealing too much, Digger eventually introduces a piece of information that completely changes the context of what we have been watching. Things that initially seemed painfully obvious suddenly become much stranger.
In conversations I’ve had with other writers at this publication about Digger, one thing has become abundantly clear: there is no coherent consensus on what to make of this thing. The word “prank” has been thrown around, and honestly, I can see it. That kind of elaborate provocation certainly isn’t beneath Iñárritu. For much of the film, he seems almost deliberately intent on convincing us that Digger is far simpler than it actually is.
The central argument of Digger emerges when billionaire oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (played with unhinged gusto by Tom Cruise under heavy makeup) addresses the European Parliament. Summoned to answer for his role in a catastrophe, Digger argues that he cannot bear sole responsibility for the state of the world. After all, ordinary people embraced the oil his company extracted because it made their lives more comfortable. Rather than allowing us to place responsibility entirely on one grotesque billionaire, Iñárritu turns the accusation outward. And, honestly, I think there is some truth to his argument.
We are all participants in the systems that sustain our way of life, even when we object to those systems or wish they operated differently. That doesn’t absolve Digger of responsibility. His wealth, influence, and knowledge confer a degree of culpability that an ordinary person obviously does not share. But the uncomfortable truth buried inside his self-serving defence is that the rest of us aren’t entirely removed from the equation either.
I understand the criticism that Iñárritu is engaging with ideas that cinema has explored many times before. Cinema has repeatedly warned us about climate change, corporate greed and our dependence on fossil fuels. But one idea in Digger’s monologue remains particularly compelling: despite everything we know, we still desire the comforts that our dependence on oil makes possible. We may hunger for alternative energy, but we are considerably less enthusiastic about surrendering the comfort, convenience, and abundance to which we have become accustomed.
Some viewers may find Iñárritu’s willingness to implicate his audience smug. Perhaps it is. But Digger isn’t particularly interested in allowing its audience to believe that recognising the problem somehow places them outside of it.
There are at least two other standout performances in the cast aside from Cruise, who naturally gets the lion’s share of the action. Riz Ahmed plays Dr. Nirav Ganesh, Digger’s head of environmental safety, while John Goodman plays Compson, President of the United States. Compson seems to be some ungodly mash-up of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a craven husk of a politician who reveals exactly what kind of character he is from the moment he appears. Goodman plays him like a complete cartoon, with exaggerated neck-straining, bulging eyes and grandiose yelling. He understands the assignment.
Ahmed, meanwhile, plays Dr. Ganesh as a timid but brilliant scientist who repeatedly takes the blame for a collection of aging men who can barely comprehend the advanced science he is trying to explain to them. There is something simultaneously funny and horrifying about watching Ganesh explain exactly what is about to happen, only for the people with the power to prevent it either misunderstand him, decide that acknowledging reality would be too inconvenient or, this being America, turn to the military for a solution.
Credit should also go to casting director Francine Maisler for assembling a supporting cast filled with faces that look exactly like the kind of chuds who would populate a Compson administration. It’s a small detail, but an effective one: before some of these characters even open their mouths, you already understand the kind of room Ganesh has walked into.
The visual style of Digger has also attracted considerable attention. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki marks his first collaboration with Iñárritu since 2015’s The Revenant, which won Lubezki the last of his remarkable three consecutive Academy Awards for Best Cinematography. Here, Lubezki and Iñárritu embrace a deliberately muted palette, with colour grading that leaves much of the film looking washed out and almost sickly.
Perhaps that is appropriate. Despite the heightened satire and cartoonish characters, there is an inescapable sense of doom hanging over Digger. Even at its most ridiculous, the film never allows you to completely forget that something terrible is happening just beyond the joke. Thankfully, it never reaches the level of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, a film whose satire could feel less like an invitation to engage with its ideas than a lecture delivered to anyone who hadn’t already agreed with them.
If anything, Digger occasionally reminded me more of the strange, alienating tone of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. There is something similarly off-putting about the world Iñárritu and Lubezki create here: its characters behave grotesquely while the images surrounding them suggest that the consequences of their stupidity are anything but funny.
There are also shades of Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On in the film’s willingness to draw attention to its own artificiality. Fellini famously allows the machinery behind his film to become visible, while Digger similarly seems unconcerned with maintaining a seamless illusion. At times, the obvious construction of what we are watching feels less like something the film wants us to overlook than something it actively wants us to notice.
Yet, for all of its political grandstanding, the most interesting argument in Digger may ultimately be the one the film has with itself. To explain exactly why would mean giving away the film’s biggest surprise, and Digger is best experienced knowing as little as possible about where it is headed. What I can say is that Iñárritu saves one of his most effective tricks for the very end. As “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” begins to play, the houselights slowly come up, deliberately collapsing the distance between the movie and the audience watching it. It is strangely overwhelming. For a few seconds, getting up and walking back into the world outside feels like part of the movie.
Maybe that uncertainty is ultimately the point. Digger is messy, abrasive, occasionally exhausting and capable of being both painfully obvious and unexpectedly perceptive. I walked out of the theatre not entirely sure what I thought about it, and hours later I’m still turning it over in my head. Perhaps months from now I’ll decide I saw a masterpiece. Perhaps I won’t. Either way, I don’t think I’m going to forget it.
Watch the trailer right here.
All images via Warner Bros. Discovery.
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Screenplay by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman
Produced by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Mary Parent, Tom Cruise, Michael Sharp
Starring Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Premiere Date: October 2, 2026
Running Time: 129 minutes
Other Writers Say…
Jaime Rebanal
Pretty convinced that this is a prank, and if it is, I respect Alejandro G. Iñárritu for the audacity. Unlike my experiences with The Revenant or Bardo, I was never bored. Tom Cruise is incredibly committed to his performance here, turning in some of his best work – though given the nature of the material in question, it seems to serve an ego. One that meshes pretty perfectly well against that of Iñárritu’s, as he’s turning in what’s undoubtedly the most ambitious feature he’s made yet. Unfortunately, it’s also just not nearly as funny as you’d want this to be. It seems like the perfect culmination of Iñárritu’s worst tendencies as an artist, in that he’s mistaking nihilism for profundity, then appropriately treating it as a joke.
There’s a certain reveal that takes place early on that has been hidden from the marketing; if I said anything specific, I would risk spoiling this movie. That said, I think it’s where Digger really shows you the kind of movie it hopes to be, and I was with it for a bit. Yet I can’t say there’s really much else to take away from it, other than Iñárritu laughing at anyone who’s going to hate this movie. To that end, I want to say I share that same laughter which Iñárritu delights within, but it’s also where Digger loses me. At a certain point, you feel he’s just rambling on and on, because this world sucks – but what more can he say to fill in the rest of that time? Then again, wasting our time might have been Iñárritu’s intention after all.
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