‘Digger’ is a flop. It’s also the best climate crisis movie

I didn’t want to see “Digger.” The trailers, in which Tom Cruise, in heavy old-man makeup, plays a cartoonish oil baron named Digger Rockwell, looked empty, grating, unfunny. What’s more, I already knew the film’s big twist, which has been widely spoiled, and which I will also spoil, below.
My premonition turned out to be well founded. The film has been roundly savaged as a critical and financial catastrophe, a soon-to-be legendary flop that will go down alongside Cruise’s biggest public missteps, like the couch jumping, the Matt Lauer interview and “Knight and Day.” Perversely, I decided to see “Digger” anyway, hoping to rubberneck, and the first 30 minutes played out just as I suspected. The film begins as a rickety “Dr Strangelove”-esque satire, coated in flop sweat and whiffing on all the jokes. Sandra Hüller, playing Digger’s little sister, screeches her lines and dresses like a Spirit-of-Halloween Annie Hall, while John Goodman, as President Compson, roars like a community-theatre George C. Scott. Everything is unendurably loud; nothing is funny.
Yet, by the time the credits rolled two hours later, I was moved and engaged, and no longer hiding my face in my hands. The director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, has hidden a quiet, thoughtful movie about our collective failure to act on climate change inside the husk of an earsplitting, empty one. As a result, “Digger” may be the best climate crisis movie ever made, cleverly disguised as the worst.
Climate crisis movies have always been notoriously hard to make, for the same reason the climate crisis is hard to combat: It’s too big. Everyone’s affected, but not in the same ways, on the same timelines, or at the same scale. We can see and comprehend elements of the problem but no one sees the whole picture, or how its disparate causes and effects connect together.
Paul Schrader’s 2017 film “First Reformed” tackled climate change by focusing on one tortured man’s psyche, following a priest, played by Ethan Hawke, who crosses paths with the radical environmentalist husband of a parishioner and descends into spiritual despair. Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” in 2021 parodied our societal indifference through a parable about alarmed scientists warning everyone about a meteor coming to destroy Earth. Climate change has been exploited for apocalyptic action-movie spectacle, as in “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Snowpiercer,” or fashioned into allegory, as in Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” and Valentyn Vasyanovych’s war-fallout film “Atlantis.” But it’s always the backdrop.
“Digger” succeeds where previous climate-warning films have fallen short because it truly captures what the cultural critic Amitav Ghosh called “the great derangement,” our total imaginative failure in the face of the scale of what is happening to the planet. To do so, the film takes a different, and unusual tack — and here’s where we get to that oft-spoiled twist.
Around the half-hour mark, having endured that outlandish opening, we learn that what we’re watching is actually a dress rehearsal for a play called “Fossil Fools,” and Cruise’s real character is a disgruntled actor named Curtis Markson who’s playing the role of Digger. The climate apocalypse being depicted in the play has already happened, and the world survived it, sort of — and this play has become an unlikely hit, offering its audience a sense of catharsis and a chance to boo its cartoonish villains.
Watching Markson wander backstage, muttering about his ridiculous role, I slowly started to grasp that none of the actors involved in the play seem to think it’s particularly funny or, really, any good at all. The actors are mostly the opposite of their onstage personas: They’re subdued, respectful, kind to one another, and maybe a little sad. This dynamic cleverly flips the usual play-within-a-play structure in which the hysteria tends to occur backstage while the show goes on.
It also neatly mimics the sensation of climate despair: Mostly, you just go about your life. But every once in a while, you need to freak out — and when you do, you too might resemble one of the two-dimensional characters depicted in “Fossil Fools.” In one of the many memorable pans of the film, New York magazine’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that watching the film felt like “being trapped inside a tuba for two hours.” He’s not wrong — the movie is loud and overwhelming and in many ways repellent. But for me, that’s how “Digger” succeeds. It acknowledges the ways in which art about the climate crisis almost always resembles being stuck inside a tuba: The pitch of our indignation and our terror and panic at what is being lost reliably render us overwhelmed and incoherent.
By daring to make the movie this way, Iñárritu not only courts audience rage (at this writing, the film sits with a deadly C+ on CinemaScore, which measures viewer reaction), but also risks making himself, having twice won an Oscar for Best Director, look incompetent. For a movie about Method acting, role-playing and artistic failure, it’s an apt gesture, if a slightly insane one.
In the film’s final moments, Cruise’s Markson character derails the play’s dress rehearsal. How do you play someone like Digger Rockwell, he demands — someone who knowingly ushered the planet past the point of collapse? The play offers us a cartoon, he argues, but this was a real man.
Jesse Plemons, playing a mysterious producer, reveals that he is the nephew of the real-life Digger Rockwell, and he reminds everyone: Yes, his uncle was real, as were all the other ghoulish characters on the stage. The planetary devastation is also real, as is the communal need for catharsis. During productions of the play, we learn, audiences cheer and weep, indulging their atavistic urge for punishment and retribution. They hoot at the death of Digger Rockwell — and then they line up to see it again and again. The play might not be perfect, or even good. But as the credits roll, and as we follow its audience out the doors into the surrounding devastation, Mr. Iñárritu asks us to consider what a better version of that story might look like. How might we tell future generations of our failure? “Digger” is such an accurate portrayal of the necessity of bad art that it’s very easy to mistake it for bad art. It’s certainly provoked that response from many viewers: During its second weekend in theatres, its audience plummeted even further, fuelled in part by toxic word of mouth.
Yet beneath the shouting, the ungodly animatronic cat and Cruise’s layers of prosthetics, “Digger” is a surprisingly empathetic, nuanced film about the difficulty of confronting, let alone averting, climate change. It strives to understand what has happened already, what will happen to us next, and even why. We know all of this is too big, the film says, and it’s going to make shrieking cartoons of us all. The New York Times