Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director, returns with Digger, a film that registers as a significant disappointment. The movie presents an exasperatingly shallow and self-congratulatory satire, anchored by high-profile talent who deliver underwhelming performances. While cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner succeed in creating disturbing, dreamlike imagery that visually bulges from the screen, the narrative itself proves laborious. Laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances, so it’s disconcerting to discover that the event in question is the most disappointing film of the year: an exasperatingly shallow. Yes, but the film’s value resides chiefly in some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen, conjured by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner, there are moments to enjoy in Tom Cruise’s boisterous leading turn. Digger likes to brandish this to make a point.
Tom Cruise plays the central character, an aging and paunchy Texan oil tycoon nicknamed Digger. Sporting prosthetics, a wispy hairline, and a Southern twang reminiscent of Slim Pickens’s character in Dr. Strangelove, Digger is obsessed with a battered shovel that belonged to his grandfather. His morning routine centers on pampering his incontinent cat and managing reports of a precarious situation at his Arctic drilling site. An ageing, paunchy Texan oil tycoon called “Digger” Rockwell is seen fretfully getting up in the morning, cooing over his horrible old incontinent cat, taking urgent messages from underlings about a certain situation developing in his drilling station in the frozen Arctic. Together with a good-ol’-boy twang and a Stetson borrowed from Slim Pickens’s bomb-riding army major in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, he is played by Tom Cruise with a wispy baldingness and various other prostheses. Digging for black gold as a penniless young man in the lone star state, his prized possession is the battered old shovel his granddaddy used a century before.
The central crisis emerges when his terrified chief scientist, Ganesh, played by Riz Ahmed, reveals that years of ignored warnings regarding irresponsible drilling have led to a catastrophe. A massive ice floe, significantly larger than Manhattan, has detached from the Arctic and is currently hurtling toward the Norwegian coast, threatening an impact akin to a nuclear strike. Querulous and terrified chief scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) that the company’s irresponsible drilling practices, of which Ganesh has been warning Digger for quite some time, have caused a crisis: a vast ice floe, many times the size of Manhattan island, has broken away from the Arctic landmass and is now moving quickly, digger’s – and the world’s – troubles come to a head when he is informed by his cringingly polite.
Digger maneuvers his way into a White House crisis meeting led by President Compson, a role played by John Goodman with a cranky demeanor. Despite the presence of military brass and politicians like the vice-president—portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg—Digger effectively seizes control of the situation. He criticizes the government for its complicity in the crisis, even as his own half-sister, played by Sandra Hüller, is relegated to a largely vacant role.
The film’s tone becomes increasingly shrill during a sequence where Digger lectures a stylized UN assembly, castigating their hypocrisy for consuming oil while publicly decrying it. During this monologue, he dismisses renewable energy and nuclear power as non-viable alternatives. Crucially, Digger’s claims remain unchallenged throughout the film, serving as a bleak reflection of his cynical perception of bad faith in others. The movie eventually takes a narrative lurch into a high-concept twist that undermines the stakes of the action, leaving the story trapped in a postmodern dilemma that fails to investigate or dramatize its central issues effectively. Part of what we are perhaps supposed to admire, in spite of ourselves, about his realist sense of everyone else’s bad faith, yet Digger’s claim remains unchallenged.
