By Dominic DeGrinney, Opinions & Editorials Editor
A movie like “Digger” should not exist. It is unflinchingly bleak, theatrical and purposefully unsatisfactory, contributing to an experience that would fail to capture an audience even if the marketing team had done their job.
The film, directed by Alejandro Iñárritu, is such a monumental failure that celebrities like Anne Hathaway, Glenn Powell and Guillermo del Toro have taken to defend it online.
“Love the arts. F*** the Charts,” del Toro posted on X.
In a hilarious turn of events, “Digger” marketing has gone the route of Coppola’s “Megalopolis” by marketing its abject financial failure as a selling point. This insane hustle tactic feels like it was proposed directly by the titular character Digger Rockwell, portrayed by Tom Cruise.
The film’s main plot is very similar to films like “Don’t Look Up” and “Dr. Strangelove,” combining critiques of science denialism and the inability of elites in boardrooms and bunkers to make empathetic decisions.
One notable part of the movie is the “Fossil Fools” reveal, when the audience discovers the events that have unfolded are part of a stage production. Cruise’s character is actually Curtis Markson, an actor portraying the role of the real-life oil magnate Rockwell in the play.
At this point, many cinemagoers expecting a black comedy with Cruise would simply check out. The movie expects the audience to withstand hit-or-miss humor, hold two co-dependent intersecting plot points together and deal with heavy-handed climate commentary.
It is further revealed that Markson finds his role increasingly difficult as the satirical portrayal takes too many liberties with the calculated and insidious man that Rockwell was.
Despite Markson being central to the side plot about interrogating and ruminating on the impacts of oil tycoons, it is the play’s producer and Rockwell’s son Kenny, played by Jesse Plemons, who gives the most important monologue in the movie about catharsis.
Kenny states that these satirical plays exist to help reconcile with the fact that these events happened. It is almost hopeful that people can come together to commemorate and celebrate the deaths of those villains who changed the course of human history.
“Digger,” a new film starring Tom Cruise, features an ambitious yet anticlimactic plot.
This is a self-serving monologue told from the perspective of someone who has inherited the wealth of those that caused the crisis. It also comes from a person who works in a global security firm that functions like Palantir or Pegasus.
The present-day narrative is “Digger” at its most ambitious, but also the most scattered. There are so many different implications and ways that the central narrative is affected by the recognition of who is consuming and producing the art.
Breaking the suspension of disbelief, as “Digger” boldly does for the sake of its present-day plotline, creates an effect of alienation. Playwright Bertolt Brecht called this strategy the verfremdungseffekt, the distancing effect or v-effect, which was essential in his conception of epic theater.
“Fossil Fools” has an exposition, a rising action, a climax and a central flaw that undermines its resolution. The present-day plotline cannot be described as such, and the problem of Markson is solved in an anti-climax through coincidence, followed by one final reveal during the credits which illustrates just how little the plotline matters.
This film is by no means a masterpiece. It is scattered and its humor can be hit-or-miss, but its ideas and conceptual ambition are not matched by any other movie this year. It is not the usual movie about the irreversible effects of anthropogenic climate change and is a better watch than other black comedies about the same topic.
“Digger” is a film that many will discover and come back to as a cult classic, even if it does not achieve the heights of “Dr. Strangelove.” There is no movie that is as self-aware and confidently self-righteous as this one, and there is a charm there that will shine to some.
While the film is a conceptual failure, it is ultimately worth watching because of its ambitious plot and thought-provoking themes.