Digger (2026)
Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu won back-to-back Oscars for Best Director for Birdman and The Revenant. But in the decade that followed, he was largely quiet, with his only feature film in that time Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which disappeared largely unnoticed into the black hole of Netflix. He returns with Digger, which is also the first non-franchise film Tom Cruise has made since 2017's American Made. The result is decidedly mixed: often grating, but with some interesting ideas.
Unfortunately, Digger
is also the kind of movie that is nearly impossible to discuss without
spoilers. The first 40 minutes or so follows "Digger" Rockwell (Cruise), an oil
tycoon whose relentless drilling has caused a piece of a glacier to fall into
the ocean, which will then lead to huge tsunamis and countless deaths. The U.S.
president (John Goodman), who's dying of rectal cancer, and his advisers must
scramble to deal with the situation.
The first 40
minutes is nails-on-a-blackboard irritating. It's very broad, and rarely funny.
Then a twist/pivot/gear shift happens around the 40-45 minute mark that casts
the film's story in a different light, and it is an interesting one. But sadly,
the movie then spends another 40-45 minutes alternating between the annoying
stuff and the compelling stuff. It does have the good fortune of being at its
best in its final act. But again, it's impossible to discuss what makes the
final act good without spoilers.
Buzz has always
been a thing, but it's intensified in the social media era. For the last two
weeks, the knives have been out for Digger online, declaring it a bomb
etc. While it is an undeniably flawed film, it is ambitious and
thought-provoking (its ideas are not just limited to "climate change is bad" as
the trailers make it seem). It's unique enough and has enough going for it that
it will find a cult following one day, even if the current reception seems
destined to be unkind.
