Things aren’t looking good for Digger Rockwell, the ageing oligarch behind the crisis in Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s new climate change satire Digger. Nor is the prognosis rosy for the film itself – panned by critics and passed over by global audiences, it is poised to become one of the biggest flops of 2026. But don’t let that negativity fool you.
Pretentious, bombastic and sometimes painful, it is nevertheless a brutal takedown of the forces and failures behind planetary degradation. Held together by a terrific performance from Tom Cruise, Digger is more than worth your time – even if you end up hating it. Imagine a world where ruthless capitalists set their sights on Greenland’s natural resources, with the express support of the US government.
Now, if your brain isn’t addled from such flights of fancy, imagine that years of extraction have led to potentially world-ending consequences. Must-watch documentary shows how Bush Senior failed the climate That’s the situation in which Rockwell finds himself after an explosion at one of his oil rigs dislodges an iceberg the size of Maryland, sending it straight towards Europe. What follows is a Dr Strangelove-esque send-up of our current political morass that, to be frank, is rarely very funny.
There’s a moment early on in Digger that sums up the problem: President Compson (John Goodman) and his hawkish advisers meet with Rockwell to discuss the impending disaster. In so doing, one of Compson’s cronies uses invective of a sort that can’t be published in respectable science magazines. A better comedy might have left the joke hanging as a burst of welcome absurdity, but Digger ploughs on.
Compson and his cronies fall into peals of laughter at the mere thought of women entering the halls of power. In service of what looks like a tired old trope, Digger cuts itself off at the knees. But oddly enough, that’s part of the point.
It’s hard to, er, dig into what Digger is all about without spoiling the film entirely, but it is concerned with how we tell stories about “real” issues. And in fact, some of the most appealing moments of Digger come when it plays with scale – the value of one death over hundreds of thousands, or of a single man’s influence over the crowd. But as time goes on, you begin to see why Iñárritu lets the artifice peek through, and then the film’s true nature unfolds.
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