Digger is that Tom Cruise Climate Catastrophe movie you might not have been expecting. I watched the trailer a few months ago and was not clear this was a “climate change movie”.
In fact, that’s kind of what bugs me.
Climate change is a fact. It’s not just settled physics, it’s happening all around us, causing some of us to flee our homes, some of us to choke on the air outside, and all of us to wonder what is happening to the weather and the seasons. The drive to transition to clean energy, and the global fossil fuel oligarchy’s desperation to hold on to its power, (think Ukraine, Iran, and the fossil fuel takeover of the Republican Party) is the underlying lens to understand most of the headlines that we see day today.
It is as real a historical fact, (much more long lasting and consequential in my mind) as World War II, the Depression, the Cold War, or the Space Race.
All of those things have been the subject of movies, but moreover, any movie that pretends to set up a “real” world has to include those historical facts as background reality.
But Climate Change, the most important underpinning fact not just of our moment, but of the geological epoch, is relegated to being the subject of “a climate change movie” – as if it were some kind of separate world of speculative fiction. We’ve had a few of those movies, but what we have not had is a general agreement in setting the story of our moment, that climate change exists, and is a fundamental underlying driver of human events in this time.
And, in this case, as in “Don’t Look Up”, which had to treat the issue in a metaphor, it’s wrapped in a satire so dense, so “arty”, so much a personal stamp of this particular Director, that it exists in a separate category, in another world of art and imagination, apart from the one we live in.
Bethan Ackerly in New Scientist:
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.
I can appreciate why people hate this movie. It seems like an utterly reasonable response. I wasn’t sure if I liked it for the majority of its run time.
“Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever. To me, I just think, like, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re going to get? A bunch of shitty, homogenized movies,” he explained. “You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing, and that means you’re going to sometimes look bad.”
“I loved this brilliant movie. It’s smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious. It’s worth making the time see and decide for yourself what you make of it. For me? 10/10.”
At last, a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous. Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check. Piloted by a spectacularly obnoxious Tom Cruise, who evidently spent hours in the makeup chair each day to look his age, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s wannabe Dr. Strangelove is a heavy-handed cataclysm scenario built around the blunt point that any attempt to halt global warming this late in the game is pure political theater.
Tom Cruise’s performance is as brilliant as it is repellant, and he deserves some kind of nomination. The visual presentation leaves a lasting impression.
This might be a movie that will hit differently in 25 years, and could be viewed differently then, we’ll have to see.
All that said, while there were times I was ready to walk out of the theater, the film’s ending packed a punch that left the audience silent in their seats as the credits rolled, and delivered the movie’s most powerful point.