Texas — “Digger,” starring Tom Cruise as a Texas oil tycoon whose actions unleash forces beyond his control, approaches its subject as though it is delivering something far greater than a conventional message. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging Southern fossil-fuel magnate buried beneath heavy jowly makeup and thinning, disheveled white hair. Digger does not merely control his company; he dominates the oil business and, by extension, believes he holds influence over America and perhaps the entire world.
Cruise delivers every line with emphatic force, portraying Digger as a swaggering caricature of American arrogance. The character resembles a combination of LBJ and Foghorn Leghorn, with the actor leaning into the same kind of exaggerated comic performance he previously used for his fat-suit appearance as vulgar Hollywood executive Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder.” Cruise once wanted to make a Les Grossman movie, and “Digger” can feel like an elaborate version of that idea: a vehicle that allows him to go all out for two hours with a deliberately oversized performance resembling a “Saturday Night Live” sketch played with the intensity of Method acting.
Taken purely as a performance, Cruise’s work is carefully constructed and entertaining. Watching him unleash that energy is enjoyable, at least in theory. But Les Grossman was created as a lightweight show-business joke, while Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who directs “Digger,” is pursuing considerably weightier material.
The story unfolds in a near-future setting, beginning with Digger waking inside a mansion that resembles a gilded fortress as much as Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. He sleeps beside a fluffy white cat that is dying and, oddly, is portrayed by a mechanical replica. Soon afterward, Digger receives an urgent message from his henchman in the Arctic, where his company’s oil exploration has encountered a serious problem. A crack in the ice, initially only a few feet wide, is rapidly expanding.
Digger dismisses the danger. His philosophy has guided the company for decades: Drill, baby, drill, and fuck the consequences.
This time, however, the consequences refuse to stay contained. Years of climate damage and reckless drilling in remote parts of the world have released a wave of methane, presented as an environmental threat so severe that carbon dioxide appears almost harmless by comparison. A 400-mile-wide ice shelf breaks away from the glacier and begins drifting toward Europe. Its projected collision with the continent threatens to produce a tsunami, a massive disaster and widespread death.
“Digger” positions this countdown to catastrophe as a climate-change counterpart to “Dr. Strangelove.” It also aims for the social satire of “Network” while attempting to push beyond the climate-change warnings of Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up.” The film’s argument about climate change is unmistakable, but its increasingly extreme approach can feel less like persuasion than a guilt trip. By making the impending catastrophe so enormous, the movie effectively suggests that failing to accept its apocalyptic warning means becoming part of the problem.
The difficulty is that “Digger” is not especially funny. It is bold, confrontational, strange and willing to take unpredictable swings. Because its performers are constantly operating at maximum intensity, it can resemble a comedy, particularly a deliberately excessive version of a Coen brothers film. But “Dr. Strangelove,” powered by Peter Sellers’ comic genius, was genuinely sly and hilarious. “Digger” adopts the structure of a doomsday satire while largely abandoning that subtlety in favor of an extravagant spectacle built around relentless admonishment.
Iñárritu, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman, presents the movie as an elaborate visual exercise. The sets are densely detailed, while the monochromatic color scheme sits just short of full black-and-white. Every aspect of the production emphasizes its determination to look unlike conventional movies.
Whether “Digger” will connect with audiences is less certain. The film carries such an enormous sense of importance that it can become weighed down by its own ambitions. Its production cost more than $125 million, a figure that is difficult to justify while also reflecting the filmmakers’ confidence that audiences will turn out in large numbers for such an intentionally ponderous absurdist lecture.
The film presents Digger Rockwell as though he were descended from Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood,” another movie whose didactic qualities could overwhelm its strengths even as its message about capitalism became particularly appealing to a generation of movie enthusiasts. “There Will Be Blood” was undeniably arresting. “Digger” is more imposing, including a Brechtian development that inspires both astonishment and confusion. First comes the thought, “Are they really doing this?” followed by the question, “Why are they doing this?”
A movie built around broad, relentless scolding is different from one built around elegant satirical madness. Alongside Cruise, “Digger” features John Goodman as the President of the United States, played with grim, one-note menace. His character is dealing with “ass cancer,” a gag that again raises the question of whether the movie is actually funny. Sandra Hüller plays Digger’s enraged half-sister, who operates an environmental company and serves as a representation of the film’s idea that “activism” is merely a delusional token offered by the oil industry.
Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, Digger’s close scientific adviser and the character most firmly connected to reality. As a result, Ganesh becomes the bearer of unwelcome information before eventually turning into a frazzled, drunken wreck.
One sequence does generate genuine tension, largely because of Cruise’s performance and the argument at the center of it. With the world moving toward catastrophe, Digger addresses a global assembly resembling a future version of the UN. He explains why society has remained dependent on oil: because you want it that way. His argument is that people remain attached to 1,000 lifestyle choices extending well beyond gasoline-powered cars, and that they are unwilling to surrender them.
The speech becomes the film’s version of a Howard Beale moment. For roughly 10 minutes, “Digger” shifts its focus away from the usual villains and turns its criticism toward the broader public, while Cruise delivers the argument with fiery, almost evangelical enthusiasm.
That idea soon disappears, however, and the film returns to its accusatory disaster-movie pessimism. Without revealing more about the movie’s fourth-wall-breaking device, its effect is to make “Digger” seem, perhaps unintentionally, to be as much about Tom Cruise assuming this role as it is about the climate crisis itself. Iñárritu has constructed an enormous platform for Cruise to occupy, and that becomes a fundamental misstep. The result reinforces the notion that addressing the climate-change crisis requires separating the issue from the self-congratulating spectacle surrounding those attempting to confront it.
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