For years, I’ve looked forward to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s films with a special kind of excitement because they rarely go where I expect them to.
From Amores Perros and Babel to Birdman, The Revenant, and Bardo, his movies have always felt unpredictable.
So when I went to see Digger at Star Cineplex in Bashundhara City four days after its release, the nearly empty theatre surprised me.
Still, this was Iñárritu directing Tom Cruise, with Emmanuel Lubezki as cinematographer, and that alone made the screening feel unusual.
The film’s backstory also caught my interest, as it points to the film’s larger idea.
Iñárritu started thinking about it after finishing The Revenant, but it took nearly 10 years for Digger to come to life.
Tom Cruise had wanted to work with him ever since he saw Amores Perros.
They started talking about the project while Cruise was filming Top Gun: Maverick, and Cruise later spent years making some of the world’s biggest action movies.
At last, Iñárritu had put one of cinema’s most famous heroes into a film that questions what heroism really means.
The film starts off in a surprisingly simple way, but it quickly points toward its real concern.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an eccentric oil billionaire who cares more about his sick cat than the growing problems at his Arctic drilling site.
Things quickly get worse: there’s an explosion in Greenland, a huge chunk of ice breaks off, and Europe faces a possible environmental disaster.
As Rockwell shifts into crisis mode, Riz Ahmed’s Dr. Nirav Ganesh tries to explain the science, while John Goodman’s President Compson looks at the situation through the lens of politics and survival.
For a while, I thought I knew what kind of movie I was watching.
It could have turned into a disaster film, a political satire, a climate thriller, or even a quirky science fiction story.
But about thirty minutes in, Iñárritu completely changes the film’s tone and emotional character.
In movies, this kind of swift shift can be risky, but I’ve always liked films that take that chance.
A director sets up one mood and lets the audience get comfortable, then suddenly asks them to adjust to something completely different.
When it works, the audience has to let go and find its way back into the story. Iñárritu often does this.
Birdman blurred boundaries between acting and reality. Bardo moved between memory, imagination, and truth.
Babel showed how one event could affect lives across the world, and The Revenant put human will up against a natural world that doesn’t care about our plans.
In Digger, the change is even more radical. We discover that Rockwell is also a character in a stage production called Fossil Fools.
Cruise is actually playing Curtis Markson, an actor performing Digger in a theatrical retelling of a catastrophe that happened decades earlier.
Sophie Wilde directs the production, while Jesse Plemons’ Kenny Rockwell finances it. Suddenly, the walls, sets, and performances mean something different.
We are no longer simply watching a climate disaster; we are watching people trying to turn catastrophe into art.
This is the point where Digger really stood out to me because it sharpens the film’s question.
Cruise isn’t just playing two characters. He is moving between two sides of the same person. On stage, Digger is loud, crude, and almost a caricature.
Curtis argues that the real man was scarier because he was smart, calm, and persuasive.
That raises an interesting question: if we make a dangerous person look ridiculous, do we reveal who they are, or do we make it easier to ignore them? Does satire help us see the truth, or does it just turn the truth into entertainment?
Cruise’s long speech in parliament is the film’s big moment.
Digger doesn’t deny the harm caused by the oil industry. Instead, he points the finger at everyone else.
He says people want cars, planes, hospitals, schools, air conditioning, fast delivery, and all the facilities of modern life. We depend on oil, then blame the person who provides it.
His argument is selfish and troubling, but there’s also an unpleasant truth in it. Iñárritu doesn’t let us simply blame one bad billionaire.
Instead, he asks us to think about what our own desire for comfort has cost the planet.
That’s why I don’t see Digger as just a climate movie. Its real subject is responsibility, and how far blame can go. Governments want power.
Corporations want profit. Consumers want comfort. Artists want to believe that exposing problems matters.
Kenny’s question is the key one in the film: after everyone explains what went wrong, what do we do next? We know about climate change, war, greed, and political lies. We make movies, plays, and articles about them. We argue about them.
But just knowing about these things doesn’t change the world.
Lubezki brings these ideas to life with spectacular visuals.
The film, shot entirely in VistaVision, often makes rooms, political halls, and private spaces feel a bit too big, as if the whole world is already a stage.
Tom Cruise’s physical transformation adds even more. Under the balding head, older skin, and heavier body, he still has that familiar Cruise energy, but Iñárritu uses it differently.
The man who usually saves the world now shows the confidence that helped harm it.
Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, and the rest of the cast help construct a world where comedy and fear often appear together.
Commercially, Digger has struggled badly.
It opened with about $20 million worldwide, including roughly $8 million in North America and $12 million internationally, despite Cruise’s star power and its enormous production scale.
That makes sense to me. The film promises action but refuses to become an action movie.
It promises disaster but refuses the usual pleasure of a disaster movie. It crosses science fiction, theatre, political satire, and dystopia, then questions them all.
So audiences expecting one clear experience were given something much harder to define.
But that uncertainty is exactly why the film worked so strongly for me.
Sitting in an almost empty theatre, I never felt I was watching a failed blockbuster. I felt I was seeing an artist take an enormous risk with cinema, star power, and form.
Digger may be one of Iñárritu’s most divisive films, but for me, it is also one of his most fascinating because it keeps returning to the same question: what do we do after we know? Some films immediately find their audience.
Others need time. I suspect Digger belongs to the second group.
Years from now, when we look back at this period of climate fear, political absurdity, consumer guilt, and the limits of art, I think people may return to this strange film and discover that Iñárritu was digging much deeper than its opening weekend suggested.
Writer: Abu Shahed Emon, ( Filmmaker )
