A deliberately ambitious misfire created to push viewers’ tolerance to the limit.
Have there ever been truly effective films about climate change?
The Day After Tomorrow, from the minds behind Independence Day, settled for crowd-pleasing disaster shtick; Don’t Look Up, from the creator of The Big Short, aimed for cutting-edge satirical bluntness; the little-seen How To Blow Up a Pipeline had moments of clarity yet its deliberately empathetic depiction of climate radicals backfired, casting its activists as anxious oddities. Interstellar and Project Hail Mary are by many measures stronger films, though labeling them as “climate cinema” remains arguable. Most notably, they celebrate bold risk-taking and human creativity in the face of civilization-level challenges, rather than delivering preachy sermons about consumption, capitalism, and environmental doom. Sublime moralizing and smug indictments of humanity rarely translate into compelling cinema.
That truth holds even when a director at the peak of his craft teams up with a global megastar. Digger, the latest effort from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and star Tom Cruise, lands squarely in the category of a spectacular misfire—conceptually audacious and at times intriguing, yet largely a grind-inducing ordeal.
To be fair, the film intends to be dreadful. It arrives as an exaggerated satire of climate villainy, placing a prickly oil magnate (Cruise) at the center, with a pompous president (John Goodman) backed by a cabinet of advisers in supporting roles. Early on, an oil rig atop a glacier erupts, generating a colossal iceberg bound for Europe, with catastrophic potential. How should the world respond? The answer, unsurprisingly, is to stand around and deliver exaggerated lines in purposely garish accents. The acting is relentlessly exaggerated; the satire is blunt to a fault. It’s painful to watch, and, yes, that’s apparently the point. This isn’t interpretation or inference.
A few spoilers lie ahead. You’ve been forewarned.
What unfolds is that the overblown, ham-fisted, painfully obvious moments are part of a staged production, a performance we eventually discover takes place decades in the future after the climate disaster depicted in the play has occurred in reality. These future denizens observe and mock the climate follies of our present, but as the story advances, it becomes clear they are living through the very consequences of that folly. The future world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland where climate effects have proven all too real. The character who plays the oil baron keeps arguing with the director about whether the extravagant satire is appropriate for the subject matter. The film wants us to grasp that, at heart, satire on this topic may be insufficient and that entertainment can double as an escape hatch for the affluent who wish to dodge responsibility.
The movie’s central conceit essentially argues that audiences should feel guilty for enjoying humor, for choosing escape, or for simply savoring art in the face of what it portrays as an all-encompassing planetary crisis. It compels spectators to sit through a deliberately rotten theater piece to hammer home the point that satire alone cannot carry the weight of real-world stakes, and that entertainment can serve as an easy getaway for those who hold power.
Credit where it’s due: Cruise and Iñárritu are at least willing to confront viewers with a conceptual burden, pushing them to engage with the message through a theatrical, meta-narrative gimmick. They are making an attempt, and while this climate-change drama lands alongside similar ventures as a misfire, it remains, intermittently, a fascinating failure—an ambitious wreck that nonetheless crashes. But at its core, it remains a catastrophe.
Crafting a deliberately pompous and unattractive production, and then insisting on its own ugliness, doesn’t erase the fact that it is indeed pompous and unattractive. This high-concept wreckage seeks to make audiences feel sullied about their enjoyment, about humor, and about the pleasures of art and fantasy when faced with what the film deems as a totalizing global disaster. It is a project designed to irritate, to grate, to provoke nerves rather than soothe them, to prove a point. And in that purpose, it plausibly succeeds.
