Summary
Taking some wild hits for the fence, here’s the kind of film that asks you to put your expectations aside – and still manages to subvert them.
It’s hard to know what to expect going into Digger. Yet somehow it still manages to surprise you. Of course, even if you only have a passing familiarity with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work, you know there’s probably a lot going on beneath the shopfront. In fact, Digger has so many layers that it’s a cinematic lasagna, with all the beautiful mess and flavour that comparison might imply.
In fact, trying to describe Digger is almost folly from the start. Prima facie, it’s exactly what it says on the tin. It’s about a bombastic Texan oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell, played by Tom Cruise under heavy prosthetics. He’s loud and unapologetic about his ways. He loves his cat. Scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) informs him his drilling has caused a potentially world-ending scenario, and Digger, Ganesh, US President Compson (John Goodman) and Digger’s half-sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) all have very different takes on the situation.
In these earliest moments, it feels most indebted to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. At the very least, it’s hard to see a group of pompous, warmongering men sitting around a boardroom table deciding the fate of the world without invoking it. The heightened backdrops, the over-the-top performances and the less-than-subtle swats at the hypocrisies of those in power all make it funny but obvious satire.
Then it changes.
To say too much would be criminal, but suffice it to say that Iñárritu is interested in peeling back the curtain to look at the story behind the story. The mythologising of history and political movements. By the time Jesse Plemons’ character is fully revealed, it occasionally threatens to dip into some both-sidesism, attacking conservatives while taunting ‘performative’ environmentalism at the same time.
Which probably makes Cruise, the poster child for Hollywood, the perfect vehicle for this role. Transformative is putting it mildly: Cruise disappears into the character, questions it and plays with its complexities. The same is true of Ahmed, Goodman and Hüller, especially when their final moments feel like a dystopian Grey Gardens.
While Digger may not be a nuanced film per se, nor does anyone involved seem to want it to be, I can’t help but admire it for daring to be different. That in itself feels like an act of defiance in big-budget stakes. It leaves us in a state of meta-awareness, arguably pointing out our own complicity in creating the world it depicts. Or maybe it’s just telling us the ship has sailed. What comes next is inevitable. Sit back and enjoy the show.
2026 | Mexico, USA, UK | DIRECTOR: Alejandro G. Iñárritu | WRITERS: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman | CAST: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons | DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. | RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 1 October 2026 (Australia), 2 October 2026 (USA)