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Alejandro Iñárritu's new film, Digger, starring Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon, is criticized as a shallow and self-congratulatory satire about a global crisis caused by irresponsible drilling.
Alejandro Iñárritu's latest film, featuring Tom Cruise as an ageing Texan oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell, has been met with disappointment by critics. The film, described as an exasperatingly shallow and laborious satire, premiered to audiences expecting a major cinematic event. Set in the frozen Arctic and beyond, it tackles a global crisis caused by irresponsible drilling practices.
Plot Centers on Arctic Drilling Crisis
Digger Rockwell is portrayed as a paunchy, ageing oilman who wakes fretfully each morning, cooing over his incontinent cat and taking urgent messages about a developing situation at his Arctic drilling station. Played by Tom Cruise with a wispy balding look, prostheses, a good-ol'-boy twang, and a Stetson reminiscent of Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove, Digger clings to a battered old shovel his granddaddy used a century ago in Texas. He brandishes it to make points about his heritage.
The crisis escalates when Digger's chief scientist, Ganesh, played by Riz Ahmed, informs him that the company's irresponsible drilling has caused a vast ice floe, many times the size of Manhattan, to break away from the Arctic landmass and move quickly toward Norway. Its imminent landfall is compared to a nuclear attack. Ganesh, cringingly polite yet terrified, has warned Digger for some time about these practices.
White House Confrontation and Satirical Targets
Aggressively unrepentant, Digger invites himself to a White House crisis meeting chaired by the gaunt and unwell President Compson. The president is crankily played, with military top brass and besuited politicians present, including a bland vice-president role that wastes Michael Stuhlbarg. Digger effectively takes over as de facto commander-in-chief, lambasting the president's reluctance to take responsibility for a situation created by political subsidies and permissions.
Meanwhile, at Digger's residence, Sandra Hüller has little to do as his half-sister, a role possibly abandoned in editing. The film's shrill characterisations are partly explained by a sudden plot development, but this only creates a second narrative strand where performances are merely inhibited and uninteresting. Cruise's set piece is a contemptuous speech to a stylised megaparliament of UN nincompoops, all shouting and pointing in grey, where Digger lacerates their hypocrisy for despising oil while being addicted to it for consumer conveniences. Tactfully, he avoids attacking movie stars' private planes.
Digger also angrily claims that moving to renewables, including nuclear, is not viable, and this claim remains unchallenged, perhaps part of what we are supposed to admire about his realist sense of others' bad faith. The film's big storytelling sideways lurch undermines investment in the action, enclosed within inverted commas as an unearned and anticlimactic high concept, presented as a fait accompli twist without full dramatisation or investigation.
Critical Reception and Cultural Resonance
As with other mainstream movies tackling big issues, there may be a tacit consensus that we have a duty to suspend critical objection, understandable at some level. Digger certainly resonates with Donald Trump's greedy urge to despoil the Arctic and elsewhere. Yet there is something glib and overblown here, leaving the film in a postmodern hole. The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki and production design by Dennis Gassner provide some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen, but the overall value is limited by very good actors giving not very good performances.
The film's moments to enjoy in Cruise's boisterous leading turn are overshadowed by its self-congratulatory tone and laborious satire. It features a trick up its sleeve, but this only adds to the disappointment. The narrative's failure to fully investigate the high concept twist leaves the audience unengaged. In the end, Digger is a disappointing film of the year, an event that fails to live up to expectations.
Alejandro Iñárritu Tom Cruise Digger Arctic Drilling Climate Satire White House Riz Ahmed
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