Tom Cruise has spent much of the last decade making himself look indestructible. Digger finally gives him the opposite assignment.
In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s sprawling black comedy, Cruise disappears beneath thinning white hair, facial prosthetics, extra weight and an exaggerated Southern accent to play Digger Rockwell, an obscenely wealthy oil magnate whose hunger for expansion helps unleash an environmental catastrophe. Instead of dangling from aircraft or sprinting toward danger, Cruise spends much of Digger talking — loudly, confidently and often disastrously — as a man convinced that being powerful automatically makes him capable of fixing the damage his power created.
It is one of Cruise’s most interesting performances in years.
The movie surrounding him is considerably harder to embrace.
Digger is big, strange, visually exhilarating and sometimes very funny. It is also repetitive, self-conscious and so determined to explain its ideas about billionaires, climate change, political cowardice and human arrogance that its satire regularly stops being satire and starts feeling like a lecture.
That tension makes Iñárritu’s film both fascinating and frustrating. There are moments when Digger feels like the kind of unruly, expensive original movie Hollywood barely makes anymore. There are others when you can almost hear it congratulating itself for being one.
Warner Bros. releases the film in theaters and IMAX on October 2. The studio describes the premise simply: the world’s most powerful man attempts to prove he can become humanity’s savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything.
Tom Cruise turns his movie-star confidence against himself
Cruise is the reason Digger remains watchable even when Iñárritu loses control of the tone.
Digger Rockwell possesses many of the characteristics Cruise usually turns into heroic virtues: confidence, relentless energy, certainty and an absolute refusal to accept defeat. Here, those qualities become terrifying.
Digger treats a planetary emergency almost like one of Ethan Hunt’s impossible missions. The crucial difference is that Ethan Hunt generally understands the consequences of failure. Digger’s wealth has protected him from consequences for so long that he assumes confidence itself is a solution.
Cruise clearly enjoys dismantling his familiar screen persona.
The prosthetics by Kazu Hiro give him a heavier, older appearance, but the transformation works because Cruise changes his movement and voice along with his face. He swaggers rather than runs. His Southern drawl stretches sentences into declarations. When Digger enters a room, he behaves as though everyone else has already agreed that he is the most important person there.
Cruise has said he worked carefully to determine how far the accent could go without breaking the movie’s tone. That balancing act is visible in the finished performance because Digger constantly sits between recognizable human being and grotesque caricature.
At its best, the movie understands the joke: Digger thinks he is Tom Cruise in a Tom Cruise movie.
He believes there must be an impossible plan, an inspirational speech and one brilliant man willing to do what frightened bureaucrats cannot. Iñárritu takes that classic movie-star fantasy and asks what happens when the heroic billionaire charging into the crisis is also largely responsible for creating it.
That is a genuinely sharp idea.
Cruise plays it without vanity.
‘Digger’ looks enormous, but its satire is rarely subtle
Visually, the film has no interest in modesty.
Iñárritu reunited with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and the movie was shot entirely in VistaVision, giving its environmental catastrophe and bizarre interiors an unusually expansive scale. Production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson create spaces that often feel slightly detached from reality — enormous rooms occupied by people whose self-importance has grown to match the architecture around them.
The images frequently accomplish what the screenplay cannot.
A collapsing natural world has an eerie physicality, while rooms filled with politicians, corporate figures and advisers are staged almost like absurdist theatre. Iñárritu frequently lets the camera move through these spaces rather than simply cutting between people, creating the sense that everyone is trapped inside the same escalating performance.
The problem is that Digger rarely trusts those images enough.
Its targets are not difficult to identify: fossil-fuel wealth, political opportunism, climate denial, American exceptionalism, corporate greed, media narratives and rich men who mistake influence for intelligence.
There is nothing wrong with obvious targets. Stanley Kubrick did not hide what Dr. Strangelove was mocking either.
But the best satire lets absurd behaviour expose itself.
Digger often underlines the joke, circles it, explains why the joke matters and then returns several minutes later to underline it again.
That is why the film’s roughly 129-minute running time can feel heavier than expected. Critics have divided sharply over this approach. Time Out praised its wildly committed black comedy, while Screen International and The Guardian found the satire shallow and overbearing. That split is understandable: the same excess that makes Digger exhilarating in one sequence can become exhausting in the next.
Riz Ahmed works because he refuses to compete with Cruise
The supporting cast wisely does not try to match Cruise’s volume.
Riz Ahmed plays a scientific adviser caught inside Digger’s increasingly irrational response to the crisis. His more controlled performance gives the movie something it badly needs: a person who appears to understand that reality does not become negotiable simply because powerful people dislike it.
John Goodman is deployed much more broadly as a political figure operating inside the unfolding disaster, while Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg and others populate a world where nearly everyone seems to have some relationship with power, performance or self-preservation. Warner Bros. lists Ahmed, Goodman, Hüller, Stuhlbarg and Plemons among the principal ensemble.
The ensemble is intentionally heightened, but that creates another problem.
Because Digger himself is already such an enormous character, giving nearly everyone around him an element of caricature removes contrast. The movie becomes a room full of people shouting variations of the same satirical point.
Ahmed fares best precisely because he often refuses that rhythm.
The movie’s biggest swing is also where it may lose audiences
Without spoiling the film’s most significant structural surprise, Digger eventually reveals that Iñárritu is interested in more than environmental catastrophe.
The movie begins questioning storytelling itself: who controls a narrative, what art can accomplish during an actual crisis and whether turning catastrophe into entertainment changes anything beyond making audiences feel temporarily enlightened.
It is an ambitious turn.
It is also the point where Digger becomes most vulnerable to accusations of self-importance.
The shift reframes some of what came earlier and asks viewers to reconsider what kind of movie they have actually been watching. For some, that will be the point where Iñárritu’s seemingly uncontrolled satire suddenly acquires another dimension. For others, it will feel like a director inserting another layer because the first one was not sufficiently profound.
The divisive response is already visible. Rotten Tomatoes listed the film at 51% from 134 reviews on October 1, an unusually split result for a project of this scale. Warner Bros. has even leaned into the disagreement in its advertising, using wildly contradictory reactions to encourage viewers to judge the film themselves.
That marketing strategy may actually be unusually appropriate.
Digger does not feel designed for consensus.
‘Digger’ is most effective when it stops trying to be important
The frustrating thing is that the movie already contains a simpler and stronger idea.
A man whose entire identity is built around controlling the world discovers that wealth cannot negotiate with physics.
That is enough.
Cruise understands it beautifully. The funniest and most uncomfortable moments come when Digger’s confidence continues functioning perfectly even as everything around him demonstrates that he is wrong. The performance gradually exposes the sadness underneath the swagger: a man who cannot imagine a version of the world in which he is not the solution.
Cruise described the film as being about “power, greed” and the difference between responsibility and irresponsibility, while also noting that Digger keeps attempting to control things that simply cannot be controlled.
Iñárritu occasionally seems less confident in that simplicity.
He piles climate anxiety, capitalism, politics, celebrity, masculinity, storytelling and artistic responsibility onto the same film. Individual pieces can be compelling, but together they compete for oxygen.
And yet it is difficult to resent Digger completely.
This is an expensive studio movie starring one of the world’s most famous actors as an unpleasant aging oil billionaire in prosthetics, shot in VistaVision by Emmanuel Lubezki, directed as an apocalyptic black comedy and willing to alienate a significant percentage of its audience.
That alone makes it more interesting than many safer films that work perfectly well.
The result is not the masterpiece its ambition appears to be chasing, nor is it the disaster its harshest reviews suggest. It is a messy, confrontational movie with several excellent sequences, a few maddening detours and one actor having enormous fun destroying the mythology he spent decades constructing.
Tom Cruise has performed more dangerous stunts.
Playing Digger Rockwell may be the bigger risk.
