There is probably very little that hasn’t been said about Digger at this point. Long-awaited yet strangely lacking in marketing, box office disaster, majorly divisive, Tom Cruise’s best, Tom Cruise’s worst, one cannot deny that Alejandro González Iñárritu has caused quite the stir. Yet, isn’t such a polarised work of art exciting for our times, for all times? Isn’t this type of conversation, especially around its central theme – the climate crisis – exactly what we need to rock the boat? Perhaps it is that Iñárritu’s latest is self-important, or that it is so overt in what it is trying to say that it misses the mark completely, but what is astonishing here is that it tries – something new, something bold, something so ridiculously out of this world that one cannot help but feel giddy at the sight of it.
Tom Cruise stars as the eponymous Digger Rockwell, an aged oil magnate whose drilling operations in Greenland set off an ecological disaster. With his head of Environmental Safety Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) and the President of the United States (John Goodman) in tow, Digger races for a solution in an attempt to balance both his personal fortune and… the lives of the European people, who face impending death as a chunk of ice five times the size of Washington D.C. threatens their homeland.
If Digger is one thing, it is full – of life, of creativity, of technique. The production design, led by Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson, is nothing short of a marvel, integrating dystopian aesthetic with a quality that often time feels Wes Anderson like. The result is an aggressively repugnant hybrid that pertains to Digger’s character – he tends to his ailing cat Maggie – a stop-motion-like animatronic that is disgusting and, apparently, disgusted by her environment – licking the out-of-date fish she rejects off his fingers, breathing with effort as he walks around his royal emporium, his personal ecosystem of distasteful wealth. In stark contrast, we meet the nervous Ganesh, the voice of reason in this scenario who is too on edge to speak out besides delivering a slide deck met with groans and disinterest. Then, of course, there is the President and his cabinet, cash grabbers who care not about the people of Europe’s livelihoods, but the cost that the damage to infrastructure will represent. The group scavenge for a solution. Then, just as one is settling into this strange, maniacal, eerily relatable story, Iñárritu turns it on his head – we’ve been had. A whole new set of stakes are introduced, and so we can begin again.
As divisive as it is, Digger is one that is not to be missed. If anything, this is cinema that should be applauded, maybe not for its metaphorical prowess, but for its daring, its originality, and its desire to do good. One should watch it for Tom Cruise, on his best comedic form since Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, and his honky-tonk monologue before the European Parliament. One should watch it because John Goodman gives it his all, his forehead vein never ceasing to pop. One should watch it because of how weird it is, because the plot twist (or two or three) is too good to miss, because it lives and breathes creative and life and tries to do something different in a cinematic scene that is increasingly dominated by remakes and sequels. So, of course, it is divisive, but it isn’t necessarily for the reasons that people think. Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph called Digger “a Dr. Strangelove for the climate crisis” – though the latter was commercially and critically well-received upon its release, and though it benefits perhaps from a little more subtlety, there is no denying that Digger has stirred something in the public consciousness. Yet this is not just another warning about rising temperatures and seas, Co2 and methane, the extinction of thousands of species – it is one that presents it, despite its obvious dystopia, as perfectly real, perfectly possible and, almost reassuringly, perfectly survivable. We are no longer trying to avoid this, it seems to say, because we are already considering the aftermath. But then again, perhaps we are not ready for that yet.
