‘Digger’ review: Tom Cruise sells us the end of the world

Tom Cruise goes full oil baron in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, a wild climate satire about power, storytelling, and catastrophe.

At some point, every disaster becomes a story somebody tells about the disaster. The dead become statistics, the guilty become characters, the warning signs become foreshadowing. And eventually some asshole gets the movie rights. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger is fascinated by that process. More specifically, the comforting distance between living through catastrophe and turning around years later to explain exactly what everybody should’ve understood as it was happening.

That makes an oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell a particularly useful monster. Played by Tom Cruise with false teeth, thinning hair, a swollen gut, and the physical restraint of a Pentecostal preacher who just discovered cocaine, Digger helps unleash an ecological calamity and immediately starts doing what he does best; Selling people a story about it. The world may be ending, but brother, this man has a perfect pitch for it.

Cruise understands the assignment down to the last throbbing forehead vein. Digger bulldozes conversations, invents folksy anecdotes, humiliates employees, sweet-talks presidents. He treats every human interaction like a negotiation he already won in the parking lot. Iñárritu smartly plugs that personality into Cruise’s late-career screen mythology, where for decades he’s been turning impossible problems into opportunities for Tom Cruise to prove that Tom Cruise can solve impossible problems. Ethan Hunt saves civilization through sheer competence, Maverick accomplishes the mission everybody else considers suicidal, and so on.

Digger possesses that same forward momentum and absolute faith in his abilities. Well, except his certainty has become part of the downfall. Cruise remains charismatic enough, though, to make the contradiction work. You can easily get why people follow Digger even while listening to him say things that should get a man launched directly into the sun.

A mesmerizing demonstration of rhetorical jujitsu.

Hence, Digger’s real product turns out to be narrative rather than oil. Riz Ahmed’s wonderfully exasperated scientist keeps returning him to physics—methane, temperature, water, gravity—while Digger keeps dragging physics back into public relations. The film’s best sequence confronts Digger with the fossil-fuel industry’s sins, giving Cruise a familiar climate-change lecture to reshape into a mesmerizing demonstration of rhetorical jujitsu. Digger embraces the charges and folds them into his sales pitch.

People drive, he argues. They fly, heat their homes, charge their phones, order crap overnight, and demand cheap energy. So his guilt becomes our complicity. And our complicity becomes his indispensability. Recognizable truths make the bullshit even stronger. Confession can function as propaganda when the confessor controls the interpretation, and Cruise tears through the argument with such exhilarating conviction that Iñárritu briefly makes us feel the seduction he’s dissecting.

The tension between reality and the stories imposed upon it expands as Digger gets stranger, broader, and much funnier. John Goodman’s American president interprets geopolitics, religion, personal illness, and environmental collapse as parts of the same cosmic narrative starring himself. All while government officials debate censorship and military solutions with the serene confidence of Wile E. Coyote ordering from an unlimited ACME expense account. Emmanuel Lubezki shoots their lunacy in gorgeous VistaVision, filling enormous rooms and landscapes with people who speak as though creation itself awaits their instructions. He even uses a washed-white exposure to stress the point. That what we’re seeing really is the sanitized version of what we’re seeing.

A philosophy of power.

Nature keeps answering in another language. Ice moves, water rises, bodies deteriorate, weather changes. Even Digger’s relationship with his dying cat becomes an attempt to extract meaning from something beyond his control. He wants somebody to explain what her final behavior means because contingency offends him. Everything requires an interpretation, preferably one with Digger somewhere near the center. And the movie gradually shifts that impulse into a philosophy of power. That if you control the story long enough, people will behave as though you control reality.

Iñárritu eventually aims that idea back at satire itself, which is where Digger earns its enormous swings. The movie becomes increasingly interested in what happens when history turns frightening people into ridiculous characters and mass suffering into entertainment. Caricature offers satisfaction because hindsight makes every villain look obvious. We get to laugh at the grotesques who came before us and imagine we would’ve recognized and call them out immediately. Even though dangerous people generally acquire power because somebody once found them persuasive.

Digger plays inside that uncomfortable gap between experiencing history and consuming its dramatization, allowing its own broadness to become part of the argument. Some of the satire still lands with the subtlety of a refrigerator dropped from a helicopter, though. And Iñárritu occasionally explains an idea long after Cruise has already communicated it with a look, a gesture, or some deranged bit of salesmanship. Yet the excess does have its purpose. The movie wants us laughing at horror, then wondering what exactly that laughter accomplishes once everybody realizes the joke hasn’t stopped the ocean from rising.

The bottom line.

Yes, this frequently ridiculous movie has a surprisingly bruised little soul. Digger treats entertainment as one of humanity’s favorite ways of metabolizing terror. Where we turn catastrophe into stories because stories give chaos a shape, villains a face, and suffering something resembling an ending. Iñárritu implicates himself in the bargain, spending a colossal Hollywood budget and one of the planet’s biggest movie stars on a spectacle about our ability to convert planetary disaster into spectacle.

Cruise makes that paradoxical gamble sing. He’s hilarious, repulsive, seductive, pathetic, and somehow perfect as a man who believes the universe simply requires better management. All while Ahmed provides the exhausted human gravity around him and Lubezki makes everyone look appropriately tiny whenever the world intrudes.

Recognizing the machinery of catastrophe can feel wonderfully similar to changing it. We laugh, argue, applaud, walk outside feeling like we’ve understood something. Then we find the same laws of gravity waiting for us outside.

Digger opens in theaters October 2. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros.