“Digger” is already making waves Iñárritu's film reminds us that our planet's survival is now a long shot

If you want to dig deep into Digger, this article needs to be split in two. The first part discusses Alejandro González Iñárritu's film starring Tom Cruise without spoilers, so everyone can enjoy it. On the other hand, the operation set up by the Mexican director and screenwriter is so intricate that it requires going further into the conception of a satire about the imminent end of the world — a crisis we are knee-deep in, with no solution in sight for getting out unscathed.

The spoiler-free review

Let us begin with the spoiler-free portion of Digger, starting with the plot: the film's title refers to Cruise's protagonist, an oil tycoon who, with his money and his arrogance, has drilled and drilled and drilled until a glacier in Greenland broke off and now threatens to strike Europe with catastrophic consequences. The man is the archetypal tycoon who couldn't care less about anyone. Everyone fears him, and he leverages that fear to always get his way — even when it comes to being informed about the environmental disasters his work causes, disasters that could lead to irreparable damage.

The fact that it is Tom Cruise himself playing the man on the verge of bringing the world as we know it to an end is deeply ironic. In the third phase of his career, he has distinguished himself quite literally as "the saviour," a role he has come to embody even off screen in the post-Covid era, when his Top Gun: Maverick reached box-office heights that gave the film industry genuine hope for recovery. He who moves through the world like a guru — with the shadow of Scientology looming but always kept in the background whenever his magnanimity and kindness are discussed — is, in Iñárritu's film, the very man whose actions could deal the planet one of its harshest blows. And not only can Digger Rockwell do nothing about it, but at times he almost doesn't want to.

This makes watching Digger a sharp cinematic experience, thanks to the contrast between what we know of the actor and what is staged on screen — a contradiction of the films he has appeared in over the last decade. Much as Birdman did with Michael Keaton, it shows how, for Iñárritu, life and art are always intertwined, separated by a blurry boundary that can be played with.

The filmmaker constructs precisely a game, a farce that draws on the lesson of Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, showing us how the survival of an entire planet is a lottery. A game in which only a few are allowed to participate — those who hold power, who will, until the very end, pursue only their own interests, without a thought for anyone else.

It is the end of the human world understood as "soul," not merely the environmental world. It is the poverty that creeps among the wealthiest, who tend their own gardens from as many acres away as possible while people scream and die in the streets. Iñárritu is blunt in reminding us how little those who protect us — or could — actually care about us. And at this point, we must move on to the spoiler section of the article to sink our hands even deeper into Digger, with a twist that complicates matters considerably.

The review with spoilers

The actors in Digger all seem powdered. Pale, as pale as Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography — drained of colour, of blood, of any hint of life. At first, this choice recalls a trend in contemporary cinema toward desaturating colours until they are extinguished entirely; but in Iñárritu's film, it suggests something else as well: that the characters we are watching are dead. They are all dead. Digger Rockwell is dead, John Goodman's President of the United States is dead, Riz Ahmed's scientist is dead. All of them.

What we are watching is a performance, with the actors playing actors within the film itself, who are reconstructing the real events that led the world to its actual downfall. They are dead, then, because they are portraying people who no longer exist. But they are also pale because they are made up as one would be for the theatre — in this case, a vast, fully equipped structure through which the performers move from setting to setting.

The film ranks among the genuine cinematic plot twists of the year. Unlike the secret at the heart of The Drama at the start of 2026 — which was far more intrinsic to the plot and would not have shifted the viewer's experience at all had they known it beforehand — Digger ventures a gear change that perhaps makes the message Alejandro González Iñárritu wants to send feel somewhat more artificial.

At the same time, the film adopts solutions that frame a society no longer merely facing an imminent environmental crisis, but one that has already fallen into it. Which is, at bottom, what all of us experience every day as we wait for the iceberg to come and annihilate us. A world that perhaps lacks the triggering event for its actual end, but in which an irreversible process has undeniably begun — one that can only drag us deeper into the abyss.

It is a post-disaster society that governs Digger, and the spectacle within the film concerns how we got there — laced with the mannerisms and obsessions of the actors, creating different layers of reading and narration that make the film as a whole an experiment within an experiment, an attempt to do something great while openly acknowledging its own doubts and limitations.

It even tells us that the planet is collapsing, if not already at its terminus, and that all that remains is the pleasure of savouring whatever scrap of vindication can be scraped together — whether it comes from a comedy, a satire, or a farce. That is precisely what Digger is: layers striving to interlock, even mechanically, with the aim of unsettling us by showing us what we are living through, while also giving us the chance to release the tension, to find laughter at the bottom of tragedy.

If this dual narrative plane may seem complicated, the film's rhetoric is in fact even simpler than expected — though that hardly matters in terms of the whole. What it wants to say, it says plainly, because in the end there is little else one can do. One must take the harm that has been done and try to turn it into something good. That is what Digger attempts to do, and it is what the spectacle within it attempts to do as well.