Digger: A Magnificent Machine That Reveals Its Engine Too Soon

By Sonup Sahadevan

Alejandro G. Iñárritu has been carrying Digger around for a long time. He first conceived the idea after finishing The Revenant in 2015, and began discussing it with Tom Cruise in 2019, while Cruise was shooting Top Gun: Maverick. That patience shows. The film is a big, loud, ambitious satire about power, greed and the people who profit from ruining the planet. It is also the most daring thing Cruise has attempted in years.

The opening stretch is gripping. We meet Digger Rockwell, an oil baron who seems an amalgam of Elon Musk, Ross Perot and every other egomaniacal billionaire you can imagine, buried under prosthetics and talking in a Southern drawl. An accident at one of his Arctic rigs has freed a killer ice floe, setting off tsunamis that threaten hundreds of thousands of lives and head straight for Europe. Digger is the man who caused the catastrophe and also the only one in a position to fix it. The President, played by John Goodman, announces as much with great confidence. Iñárritu stages all this with the kinetic, restless camera we know from Birdman, and for a good while the film feels dangerous and unpredictable.

Then the first twist arrives. It reveals what has really been going on. As the film turns out to be a film within a film, Cruise is playing Curtis Markson, an actor taking on the role of Digger Rockwell. Once you know the game, the air goes out of the room. Imagine you are watching a thrilling India-Pakistan match, every over fraught, every run feeling like it matters. Then someone leans over in the middle of the match and whispers that it’s an exhibition game. The cricket on the field has not changed, but you no longer care who wins. That is what the twist does here. The stakes that had been tightening around us loosen, and the disaster, which had felt terrifyingly real, becomes a performance we are watching from outside.

The idea itself isn’t the problem. The timing is. Held back until the very end, this revelation would have worked as a final punch, a moment that sends you out of the theatre rethinking everything you’ve seen. Played in the middle, it spends the film’s tension before the story has finished. Iñárritu clearly loves the meta-fictional conceit, but he has put his best card on the table too early and then has to keep the audience interested with what remains.

And yet, to my own surprise, the film remains enjoyable. Iñárritu’s craftsmanship doesn’t desert him once the secret is out. The satire still bites, the set pieces still dazzle, and the film’s anger at the billionaire class is still sharp. The picture’s greatest asset is the cast, who give performances of rock-solid conviction from start to finish.

Cruise delivers what I consider an Oscar-winning performance. For two decades he has been the world’s most reliable action hero, and here he abandons that persona entirely. He is vain, vulnerable, hilarious and unsettling, sometimes within a single scene. It is a performance of total commitment, and it sheds any notion that Cruise can only run, jump and hang from aircraft. It shows him in a new light, as a real actor taking real risks. Riz Ahmed is every bit his equal as Ganesh, the scientist who tries to warn Digger and the President about what’s coming and fails. Ahmed brings a quiet, wounded intelligence that anchors the film whenever the noise gets overwhelming. Goodman, as the President, is equally award-worthy. He is a thundering, pitch-perfect study of political bluster and cowardice, and his scenes with Cruise are among the film’s best. Around them, Jesse Plemons, Emma D’Arcy and Sophie Wilde give the supporting cast real depth.

I should acknowledge that critics are divided. Some have called the film shouty and self-indulgent, and the Rotten Tomatoes consensus calls it a bold swing that misses as often as it strikes gold. The shouting is real, and the film is relentlessly loud. But its ambition and its performances are so uncommon in mainstream cinema that I find it hard to dismiss.

Digger is a flawed film, undone partly by its own cleverness. A better-timed twist would have made it a masterpiece. As it stands, it is a bold, funny and fiercely acted spectacle that still deserves to be seen on the biggest screen you can find. Go for the performances, and if you can, try not to let anyone spoil the twist for you.