I guess I don’t get why people didn’t like this movie? Digger’s opening weekend has amounted to Tom Cruise’s worst showing ever, which feels a little bit silly because he has had a unique talent in picking films over the course of the last five decades and there isn’t anything about this movie that is so sloppy or offputting that it doesn’t rank above one of the early sequels to Mission Impossible, at least.
If you don’t intend to see it, it’s Inarritu’s latest satire-farce-drama following The Revenant more than ten years ago. It’s about an eccentric billionaire who manipulates the levers of power for his own personal gain while also navigating the declining health of his cat and a set of global man-made disasters. The cat doesn’t figure as prominently as you might expect from the trailers. Spoilers ahead.
The movie really starts to pick up in its first act twist, when after a semi-serious heart-to-heart between John Goodman’s President and Digger, their background glitches out and its revealed that they’re on the set of a highly produced stage set. Cruise drops the accent and launches into a whole other set of concerns and anxieties which layer onto the Digger character in their own ways. The second act launches back into the Dr Strangelovian plot that Digger is so indebted to, but now its infused with the uncertainty and camp of the metatheatrical: we see how superficial the sets are, how wooden the dialogue, the physical comedy played for laughs. Until it becomes clear that Cruise’s daughter IRL is missing in a storm on a small plane on her way to see his play’s opening night. As the dress rehearsal draws to a close, Cruise’s clashes with his director fully derail the run through leading to a second reveal: the producer who’s been tailing him the whole afternoon is, in fact, related to the Digger character they’ve been lampooning all play-long! And all the events of the play have really happened. Inarittu’s self-imposed constraints–a movie of a play about a thing that’s really happened that hasn’t happened yet–certainly is a lot more interesting to watch than the straight alternative. And certainly it feels a lot less preachy and self-important to have Digger’s iconic monologue be a rousing endorsement of climate nihilism, a chilling fact-check of the idealistic and polyannish eco-utopianists who claim that science has the answers and can solve this problem.
Digger seems messy and caught up in its own aesthetic rules to spend too much time disappointing its audience with platitudes or politics. It’s a well-composed dark comedy with all the hallmarks of a director who doesn’t see light at the end of 2028.
