‘Digger’ Review – Iñárritu’s Satire Isn’t As Clever As It Thinks It Is

The trajectory of directorial work from Alejandro G. Iñárritu is certainly fascinating, to say the least. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a pure innovator who consistently finds unique new ways to tackle familiar thematic ground, or a self-indulgent filmmaker whose movies are excruciating exercises of pure vanity. Regardless, Iñárritu, if nothing else, is a director who is able to poke at ideas of provocation and bleak truths in nearly all his work, to varying degrees of success, whether in the survivalist grit of The Revenant or the self-reflective surrealism found in BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.

Digger acts as both familiar and new ground for the director, with many touches of bleak subject matter surrounded by a comedically dark satire, but there is, however, a reason why this film’s marketing in particular has been more secretive than your average campaign. The twist that lies at the center of Digger is conceptually fascinating and is when it first hits you admittedly shocking and pairs well with the film’s themes of billionaire manipulation of our world careening us towards a scary and uncertain fate.

The problem is that the longer Digger goes on, the more you realize how prodigiously empty both its twist and central concept are, as it keeps grazing the same interesting ideas without the depth to truly dig into them. The result is an exhausting descent into increasingly empty theatrics, with elongated bits that aren’t funny or clever, no matter how many times the film tries to convince you they are through the occasional meta jab at its own satirical farce. Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast give a good amount of interiority to where the film severely lacks it, but it isn’t enough to save such a dull and outdated endeavor that has all of Iñárritu’s most frustrating sensibilities on full blast.

The film opens with Digger Rockwell (Cruise), a stuck-up billionaire with a Foghorn Leghorn Southern draw and CEO of his own oil tycoon company that he oversees from the lazy comforts of his own mansion. When he’s not trying to feed his decomposing cat Maggie, he parades through his home phone, calling many about the endeavors of his business. The rug is soon pulled out from what Rockwell views as luxury once he’s told via a call on his computer that a Rockwell oil rig in Greenland has exploded.

This is because of Digger’s decision to not stop operations when previously warned of their drilling for oil forming a crack in the ice which has now left the rig destroyed form methane and created a huge ice shelf that’s headed straight for Europe and would leave hundreds of thousands dead. Now in full discussion with his head scientist, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), and the President and Vice President of the United States (John Goodman and Michael Stuhlbarg, respectively) about their next course of action, what follows starts to lean into spoiler territory, but the film goes straight into a surprise split narrative recontextualizing both the absurdist satire we’ve seen thus far and the more somber inflections that are soon to come.

Alas, it’s always a true thorn in the side for any film critic to have to dance around huge reveals for a film, especially one like Digger, where the twist near the end of its first act is an essential structural piece to the entire movie itself. In the vaguest of terms, the film plays out as a 21st century version of Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (with social media like Tik Tok, Youtube, and even generative AI dropped within dialogue) mixed with a dash of the anger at our bleak cultural moment found within Don’t Look Up and even Iñárritu’s own Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). For much of the film’s runtime, the film essentially acts as a deconstruction of how we view both the role of satire as a piece of art in the face of world destruction and the narrative of our public perception being swayed by the wealthy elite and our comfort in a world where we are constantly exploited and exploit ourselves to the point of dystopia.

Once the central shift occurs, Iñárritu often even takes a similar metatextual approach that was found in BARDO, often knowingly winking at the fact that film is aware of how funny it is and knows it also plays at the film’s own role in our own world that feels like it’s melting away as fast as the one found in here. Digger, however, seems to be not quite self-aware enough to realize that all of the genuinely fascinating and thought-provoking ideas it’s getting at within its glacially paced runtime ultimately come across as throwing darts in every direction imaginable without a true proper cohesion to truly sell its narrative veers.

At a certain point, every turn of the film becomes another platitude of emptiness, never truly grasping the meaning behind its absurd sways in dissections of egotistical hubris. For as much as BARDO was maligned for its extreme pretentiousness, that film did find a slight sliver of profundity amidst its chaos that is just absent here. Digger’s gestures at some sort of grand meaning behind all of its ideas remain scattered thoughts that are laid out and, in some cases, explained verbatim, until what the film is doing becomes clever to the point of being tediously played out. Matters certainly aren’t helped when both the film’s play on satires and twist to work around them are both aggressively unfunny no matter how much the film wants you to know it knows it’s not funny, a film that opens up to bold swings on the surface but inside is more hollow than it would ever want you to think.

This isn’t to say that it’s all without its merits, as certain aspects like the film’s utterly expansive production design and offbeat, sporadic score from Cosmo Sheldrake, but any other interiority is mainly derived from the performances, with Tom Cruise, of course, being at the center of it all in his most inherently transformative dynamite role in a long while. What starts as what could initially be called just a role where the prosthetics are doing more acting than Cruise itself begins to unveil new layers of interiority to them as the film goes on beyond its twist.

Cruise and the entire cast, more often than not, open up a slight level of interiority that the film’s script never allows. There are two particular standout scenes where the film is as fully realized as it should’ve been throughout its evolving long stretches of monologuing, and one takes place where its reflection of the role of satire amongst our modern hell-ridden landscape is at its strongest, even at its most self-indulgent. Cruise isn’t close to the only standout, however, as Riz Ahmed stands toe to toe with him, and his Dr. Ganesh remains a highlight as a true clash with Rockwell’s wealthy narcissism. There are other standouts as well, like mysterious roles from Sophie Wilde and Jesse Plemons that are at one with the central twist of the film, but for as much occasional great moments there are, there’s as many where the characters like ones that contain more interiority and more bizarrely off base ones like Sandra Hüller’s Emma are never as fully fleshed as the material needs them to be for the film’s continuously zany sways to work and the by the time Digger ends, it wants to leave you in shock and moved but ends up as prodigiously empty.

Digger will be sure to divide audiences across the board, and to be ultimately fair, the film is partially designed to do so, but somewhere along the way, Alejandro G. Iñárritu lost his way in pursuit of a point that it simultaneously can’t make any real clarity of and is not as smart as it thinks it is, no matter how many meta jabs are made.

A satire about the role of satire in such a bleak state of affairs that isn’t particularly funny and constantly needs to tell you of its own thought-provoking nature surrounding cultural points that already feel like they’ve come and gone. Cruise and the rest of the cast fill in some of the shades that the film can’t, but Digger is ultimately a slog that never digs as deep into its ideas of the billionaire savior complex and our role in the face of careening disaster as much as it thinks it does.