(Critic’s Note: This review discusses key plot details of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film “Digger.” Some spoilers ahead.)
Near the end of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger,” Jesse Plemons’ Kenny Rockwell tells Tom Cruise’s character that he’s great at what he does because of “the constant dissatisfaction in your eyes.” And while it’s hard to talk about this film without spoiling it, that just about sums up the film, its central character, and the filmmaker behind it.
From time to time, I always get a kick out of certain movies that make wild swings and miss spectacularly, not because the misses are funny, but because the ambition (and the attempts) deserve admiration. The two recent films that come to mind which, while the majority disliked, I really enjoyed while at the same time despising it are “Don’t Look Up” and “Megalopolis.” Completing that trifecta, Iñárritu’s “Digger” might be my muse of the year: a movie so bloated, ambitious, convoluted, and tonally all over the place that I can’t help admiring its insistence to dare the audience to keep up.
And for the life of me, I like it for the glorious mess that it is.
A Climate Satire That Actually Works…
We first see Cruise’s Digger Rockwell waking up in bed at home with his elderly cat Maggie, who’s so old she may only have a few minutes more to live. With a Southern drawl and a house decorated all over with taxidermy, we get a sense from the get-go Digger’s wealth and influence (the Blofeld-like touch in the beginning helps, too). Fielding several phone calls and home visits ranging from his half-sister Emma (Sandra Huller, criminally underutilized) to the world’s top veterinarian whom he fires when telling the truth about Maggie, Digger gets a call from an employee from Greenland who warns him of a widening crack near one of his drilling operations. Unsurprisingly, Digger shrugs it off and hangs up.
Shortly after, scientists and advisers led by Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, adequately utilized) report an explosion happening right after that phone call, chipping away an enormous ice shelf, five times the size of Washington, DC, now drifting toward Europe. If it reaches its projected path, the flooding would result in catastrophic flooding that could kill thousands.
Digger’s immediate response: “How big was the damage to the rig?”
“Digger’s” lack of subtlety in these opening scenes really works for me, even as what follows further strips away any subtlety one expects. When the top US officials meet with Digger at his house to discuss plans to address the issue, the movie introduces us to President Compson (John Goodman, a vaguely Trumpian caricature) and Vice President Eddie (Michael Stuhlbarg, a bumbling, barfing veep who could give JD Vance a run for his money). They turn to Digger to fix the problem, hitting the irony so hard it makes one laugh. Imagine an arsonist burning your home and selling you a fire extinguisher while your house burns to a crisp.
One of Compson’s many lines, apart from misogynistic remarks, is for Digger to hide the situation from the public. “Control the narrative.”
It’s here that I’m reminded most of “Don’t Look Up,” a movie that relentlessly satirizes people who couldn’t let go of their self-interests in the face of an extinction-level catastrophe. To Iñárritu’s credit, when you take the film on those terms, “Digger” works pretty well as climate satire. It’s broad, ridiculous, and not especially interested in pretending otherwise. Sometimes disaster simply becomes another messaging problem.
…Until the Movie Decides It Isn’t Enough
And then the movie decides to change shape.
The biggest problem with “Digger” is that Iñárritu keeps going. Suddenly, everything becomes crystal clear: there’s a reason behind that specific quality when the trailers for the movie came out. From all the “What happened to you, Chivo?” questions to the snide “Typical Iñárritu: bloated and borderline incoherent” remarks comes the narrative deceit. Around 25 minutes in, the movie reveals that what we’re watching is actually an upcoming stage play of Fossil Fools, based on a catastrophic event that happened over 20 years ago, and that Cruise’s Digger is actually played by an actor named Curtis Markson.
This film-within-a-film meta approach, while inventive when one thinks of it, eventually sands away the grittiness of the climate change satire and starts becoming a movie about an actor’s ambivalence toward the tone of the production he’s starring in. This reframing forces us to reconsider nearly everything we’ve seen up to that point which, although clever to a degree, doesn’t improve the movie a bit.
Taken at face value, however, it makes sense why Emmanuel Lubezki shot Digger’s scenes that way, featuring broad performances, ugly close-ups, grotesque production design to match the farcical element of the play and its over-the-top characters. The “real world,” meanwhile, is shot and framed normally, allowing audiences to differentiate the two parallel stories the filmmakers are telling. As for the film itself, Iñárritu and Lubezki shot “Digger” primarily natively in the horizontal 8-perf VistaVision 35mm film format, the same format Paul Thomas Anderson revived to use for “One Battle After Another.” That distinct quality is visible here, with “Digger’s” tactile and organic widescreen look.
But again, knowing that there is a reason doesn’t necessarily mean the reason works. And this is what really complicates my relationship with the movie.
A Film That Pokes Fun at Climate Change Films
One interesting thing that “Digger” does is to poke fun at how climate change films take themselves too seriously, and when the few ones employ satire in their storytelling, the results are always a mixed bag. And with that, credits go to Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman’s screenplay (from a story Berman and Iñárritu developed with Jez Butterworth).
As the film progresses, though, it starts asking larger questions about satire itself, turning real suffering into entertainment, and historical trauma being packaged into something audiences can laugh at, cry over, and applaud. Case in point: the main conflict that Curtis has with the play is that it uses comedy to tell a tragedy, which the play’s director (Sophie Wilde) and Kenny counter with the fact that several members of the company are either survivors themselves or relatives of those who perished, and that comedy can work as a means for the public to mourn their losses in an effective way.
Honestly, that’s fascinating material there. My bigger issue is that Iñárritu muddies what was already working. The straight climate satire may not be particularly sophisticated, but it works. Fossil Fools, on its own, can actually stack up against other climate change movies, maybe even better at some points than “Don’t Look Up” (although the latter had sharper things to say about disinformation being engineered by the very people responsible for the disaster). Once Iñárritu begins folding the movie back onto itself, it starts losing that momentum in favor of something more self-conscious.
This is also where “Birdman” comes to mind. Iñárritu has already made a terrific movie about actors, artistic ego, and insecurity. And he did it with considerably more precision there. At the other end, “Bardo” encapsulates the director in a nutshell: overloaded with his own anxieties and provocations that it sometimes felt like Iñárritu’s answer to criticism was simply to give critics more of everything they complained about.
Fair enough, I suppose. But “Digger” suggests that when left entirely to his own devices, Iñárritu may be closer to latter-day Coppola than PTA on a bad hair day. Here, the filmmaker wants the big, unruly gesture. He wants everything in the movie: climate change, political farce, capitalism, acting(!), the ethics of adaptation, the purpose of satire, Tom Cruise in prosthetics—you name it. At certain parts of the movie it even feels like a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”
Eventually, though, something has to give.
Tom Cruise Still Has This in Him (Not That We Thought Otherwise)
Speaking of Tom Cruise, he reminds everyone of his ability to channel his artistic side in no time, albeit with a caveat. I think he needs to feel invested in what the filmmaker has to say. With his prosthetics and over-the-top look and performance as the titular character, the most obvious comparison will always be Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder.” Personally, though, I kept thinking more about “Magnolia.”
That monologue alone where Digger finally takes accountability for his company’s role in the environmental catastrophe by disregarding warnings and continuing the drilling operations deserves praise. In that court scene, Digger stands in front of people, accepts responsibility, then drags everyone with him, essentially saying the world feeds off the resources his company drills every day, so while it’s easier for them to take the moral high ground, they’re as guilty as he is.
Cruise is terrific in that scene because it made me remember how good he can be when he finds filmmakers whose ideas he’s genuinely invested in. And that investment meant allowing Iñárritu to drag him someplace stranger, uglier, and more theatrical than anything he’s done in years. I mean, this might be the first film in ages where I don’t recall Cruise running in his own film. Can McQ and others say that?
Ahmed and Goodman are commendation-worthy here too. Ahmed’s Ganesh is a perfect foil to Cruise’s Digger because the scientist refuses to indulge Digger’s bullshit, instead matching his energy with facts and eventually playing a role in the latter’s decision to take some responsibility for the catastrophe. Meanwhile, Goodman’s Compson nails the delusions of grandeur of Boomer politicians who have perfected the playbook of visual policymaking without doing any actual work to address the mess they are in reality a part of. Plemons and Hüller’s minor roles are more interesting to look at, as Plemons’ character (aided by the actor’s performance) becomes important to the story without even being present, while Hüller’s is regrettably expendable.
The Problem With Iñárritu’s Unrelenting Swings
When Kenny Rockwell, the actual Digger’s nephew, tells Cruise’s character—now we know to be the actor—about the constant dissatisfaction in the latter’s eyes, what it made me realize is that that line describes not only Curtis, but also his character and, to an extent, Iñárritu himself:
Digger can’t stop digging even if it summoned the apocalypse, Curtis can’t stop questioning the tonal choices and creative liberties of the play he’s starring in, and Iñárritu can’t seem to stop adding things to the film.
There’s something almost funny about a movie about excess being made with this much excess. And maybe that’s also why I find the film more interesting than frustrating, even when the frustration is very real.
“Digger” keeps circling around people who want to control the story. Compson tells Digger to “control the narrative.” Kenny has the rights to a version of a catastrophe that thousands of people lived through. Curtis complains that the play turns that catastrophe into something too broad, too funny, too inaccurate. Then Iñárritu himself spends the movie controlling and withholding information from us, only revealing what kind of movie we’ve been watching after we’ve already bought into it.
That’s clever. Maybe too clever.
‘Digger’ is a Mess (Glorious, but Still a Mess)
For the life of me, I like Iñárritu the storyteller who focuses on people as social beings constantly influenced by their environment, culture, and relationships. I admire the director’s works even post-Guillermo Arriaga (with whom he wrote “Amores Perros,” “21 Grams,” and “Babel”), with the likes of “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” while excessive to a fault, still managing to examine their characters’ humanity.
But Iñárritu the director? That’s another story. The more “Digger” explains itself, the more convinced I became that the movie believes that explanation is justification. I understand that the choices he made in the film make sense somewhere down the line, but knowing why a choice was made doesn’t mean I suddenly have to think it works.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s climate satire keeps adding ideas, changing shape, and testing your patience—so much that I kind of respected the audacity to try. I still think “Digger” would be better if Iñárritu knew when to stop. Then again, if he did, I’m not sure this would be the same movie I ended up appreciating, mess and all.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” premiered in London on September 22, 2026, and was released in the United Kingdom and United States on October 2, 2026. Follow us for more coverage.
