TL;DR – While I will champion the brilliant production design, many of the performances, and respect that they went for a big swing here, I must say that I ended up loathing this film with an anger I have never quite experienced before.
Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene.
Disclosure – I was invited to a press screening of this film.
Warning – Contains scenes which may cause distress.
Digger Review Introduction
Well, I don’t think I have ever experienced a film quite like the one we will be exploring today. It makes some of the biggest swings in cinema that I have seen all year, maybe in several years, and yet all it invoked in me was anger. Today, I will unpick the film as well as we can without heading headfirst into the inevitable spoilers. It will not be an easy balance to get right, but I shall try.
So, to set the scene, Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is an oil baron from a long line of oil barons, who has made his considerable fortune from drilling oil in places no one else would, such as a national park in Greenland or along the Alaskan coastline. He has lived a life of luxury, where his wealth and power have insulated him from most things, even the President of the United States Compson (John Goodman) comes to him for advice. But all of that changes one day when the scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) informs him that 1) a chunk of ice the size of Pennsylvania has broken off Greenland, 2) it is entirely his oil mining that caused it, and 3) now the ice sheet Judy is heading right towards Europe where it will cause flooding across the entire coastline.
The Biggest of Swings
We will get to why I walked out of the cinema angry in a moment, but it would be disingenuous of me to review this film and not champion some of the aspects that excel. The first of these is the production design. Every artist in this film that helped put those sets together, the costumes, the prosthetics, all the weird effects, even that animatronic cat, should be awarded all the awards. Every scene of this film is filled with a kaleidoscope of textures, objects, and history. Without the care of these artists, the whole film would have fallen flat. This extends to the cinematography, as every frame in this film is a stunning work of art. It captivates you in every moment with a visual language that shines above the sum of its parts.
Tom Cruise is absolutely not playing it safe here, and I do respect that. From his first scene which includes a mostly dying cat and old man butt, you can tell that he is throwing all of himself into this film and giving some remarkable nose acting in the process. John Goodman is chewing every piece of scenery, and there is a lot of scenery in this film. He is going 100 miles an hour, and never stops, even in the third act when you think he should have, he still steals every scene he is in. If I had to pick an MVP for the film, and since I am writing this, I shall, then that would be Riz Ahmed who gets to have two of the best scenes in the film because he owns them. A wall of other actors be damned, he brings you in with his acting, captivating you with his performance.
The Biggest of Misses
While I do completely respect the drive to go as far as possible, never be complacent, and take the biggest swing that you can. Sometimes, when you take that swing you miss the ball, and unfortunately, that is what happened for me here today. Unfortunately, it is hard to really unpick the narrative without running headfirst into spoilers, but we will try to be circumspect, even if the film is anything but. On that front, Digger is a film that first bemused and confused me, then annoyed me, and then finally actively angered me as we started to unpack the frankly baffling narrative choices it makes. An imploding Inception of bad ideas piled up one by one on top of each other until you reach the drowning crescendo of the film’s climax.
When I get down to what irritated me the most about Digger, it must be its story, which at best is a convoluted mess, and at worst, it is fence-sitting cowardice. And to quote my father, “sitting on the fence will only give you splinters in your …”. In the first act, this is a film playing on the weird, amplifying it at all turns, you could argue to put the audience off-balance, or because weird is all it has going on, but the movie doubles down on it. At the end of the first act, Digger reveals its hand about what it really is about, and while that was intriguing at first, as you are knocked completely off course, you soon feel a general malaise when you realise what it is trying but failing to do. It honestly feels like all these extra complications were bolted onto the narrative because they did not have strength in what the original narrative had to say. Much like a bad theatre-in-the-round experience trying to hide its poor work by bringing the narrative into the audience.
The poor narrative choices are all anchored around the character played by Jesse Plemons who might be the most insipid portrayal I have seen this year. I know Jesse does good work, but not here. Indeed, it is one of his monologues where you realise the film is trying to have its cake and eat it too, which was a particularly frustrating moment. There is only so much you can do to paper over a bad idea, and here they bared their souls, and I honestly found them wanting. There were times when I honestly wished it was a musical as it was rumoured to be, rather than what we got here. The frustrating thing is that you are constantly being reminded about the technical brilliance of the film while its narrative is being whittled away, which is a perplexing juxtaposition that grates on you.
I do wish I could get into more depth as to why the satire/farce/parody/commentary fell flatter than even Eddington, but the film is structured in such a way that it is kind of impossible to do that. To fully dive into the narrative and the choices it makes as if it was careening down the aisle like an unmoored Rube Goldberg machine, well, you would need to raise the curtains, turn on those house lights, and kick the tires of this bad idea in the harsh light of day. But I can’t do that without revealing Digger’s cards, which I don’t want to do because there were also profoundly contradictory experiences with the film within the audience I watched it with. So, if nothing else, I respect that Digger is not a mediocre film. It is, to steal from one of my work colleagues, a Vegemite film or a Dutch salted liquorice film, you will love it or hate it, but you won’t find it just average.
Recommendation
In the end, do we recommend Digger? No, I personally do not recommend the film. There are too many choices made with the narrative that preclude me from giving this frustratingly condescending movie any kind of support. It tries to make these grand statements, but then does not have the fortitude to stand behind them, and personally I cannot stand that in a film.
Have you watched Digger? Let us know what you thought in the comments below. If you liked Digger, we would recommend One Battle After Another to you because it also is a profoundly odd film taking some big swings, but it commits to the bit at all times.
By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.
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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Digger
Directed by – Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Story by – Sabina Berman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, & Jez Butterworth
Screenplay by –Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, & Sabina Berman
Music by – Cosmo Sheldrake
Cinematography by – Emmanuel Lubezki
Edited by – Stephen Mirrione & Conor O’Neill
Production/Distribution Companies – Legendary Pictures, TC Productions, Universal Pictures, & Warner Bro Pictures.
Starring – Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Robert John Burke, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman, Sophie Wilde, Pip Torrens, Mercedes Hernández, Danny Kirrane, Corey Johnson, James Dryden, Teddy Hawley, Annabel Mullion, & Stephen Wight
Rating – Australia: MA15+; Canada: 14A; Germany: 12; New Zealand: R; United Kingdom: 15; United States: R
