EDITOR’S NOTE: This story details plot points from the movie “Digger” in a manner best consumed after seeing the movie yourself, if you intend to do so.
It’s a common complaintagainst Hollywood that trailers frequently give away too much of the movie they’re trying to get audiences to see. The new Tom Cruise film “Digger” may be suffering from the opposite problem.
A “Dr. Strangelove”-esque parable about greed and climate change, “Digger” opened in cinemas on Friday, but expectations aren’t high for its performance. For a movie that had once been generating top Oscar buzz, including a potential first win for Cruise, it has since been hit with critiques that have described it as baffling, brilliant or just plain bad. It’s now projected “Digger” may bring in somewhere between just $12-15 million in its opening weekend, according to Variety, which reported the film needs to earn north of $300 million during its total global run to break even when accounting for marketing costs. (“Digger” is being distributed by Warner Bros., the parent company of CNN.)
The hole in which “Digger” appears to have found itself may be one of its own making. It’s impossible to properly talk about the movie — in reviews, on social media or even in marketing materials — without revealing that it’s not necessarily what’s been advertised.
Something happens about a third of the way through “Digger” that critics were asked by Warner Bros. not to reveal. It’s a twist, of sorts, but not in the vein of “Fight Club” or “The Sixth Sense,” which changes what you’ve just spent an entire movie watching. Instead, it’s more like the revelation that occurs early in this year’s Zendaya-Robert Pattinson movie “The Drama” or the 2022 horror hit “Barbarian”: a structural or plot conceit that sets up the realmovie you’re watching — one which none of the trailers or teasers have made clear: (Be advised: this story will contain spoilers for “Digger” from this point.)
The movie is actually about a playabout a climate disaster.
Directed by two-time Oscar-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu, “Digger” is ultimately a much more ambitious, grand and artistic meta-spectacle than the film audiences have been sold. It wants to explore how the art of the future will make sense of our actions in the present — and whether it will even be able to. Whether it achieves those lofty goals is open to debate — and many critics feel it does not— but the fact that many potential filmgoers are oblivious to this ambition may ultimately count against it.
“What fascinated me about ‘Digger’ was the way the twist kept reverberating throughout the film, and how Iñárritu kept getting new visual and formal riffs out of it,” said Justin Chang, the film critic for the New Yorker whose mostly positive review of the movie opted not to spoil things, although Chang says he considered doing so. “Even though ‘Digger’ is, as I note in my piece, an extremely obnoxious and often unlikable movie, I took my hesitation to spoil the film as a clear sign that I did, in fact, like and respect it, maybe even in spite of itself,” he said.
Cruise and co-star Sandra Hüller, as Digger’s haf-sister Emma, are part of an ensemble of top actors who signed on to the climate satire, which has provided divisive in early screenings.
“Digger” begins somewhat appropriately with a window shade rising like a theater curtain inside the bedroom of Digger Rockwell (Cruise), who owns a mansion that looks out over what appears to be a too-perfect garden scene. Rockwell is a schlubby, grey-haired, third-generation oilman who speaks in a comically large Texan drawl and values profit above all else — except, that is, his dying cat, Maggie, who appears to be so old that she moves like a robot. When a methane disaster strikes at one of Rockwell’s drilling sites in Greenland, a chunk of the Arctic shelf six times the size of DC begins drifting to Europe, where it will soon cause unimaginably catastrophic damage, warns Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s top scientific advisor. Soon, the president of the United States (John Goodman) and his cabinet of fawning nitwits come to Casa Digger — because that’s how powerful Digger is — to plan the response.
And then, outside the window in that too-perfect garden…a tree falls over. We hear a director’s voice and see a man’s head rise from the horizon. The entire garden, the entire mansion, is fake — a set. The cat looks robotic because it isa robot. Cruise drops the Texan accent, and we hear him speak in a voice that sounds like his own. He’s no longer Digger Rockwell, but Curtis Markson, an actor, clad in prosthetics, participating in tech rehearsals for a play in a cavernous theatre.
There are questions answered right at the end of “Digger” that are best experienced for yourself: What exactly is this play? Is any of this real? And how does Jesse Plemons, playing someone on the sidelines of the play, fit into all this? There’s also an ending that revels in a form of catharsis — for the audience watching the play, not the movie — before yanking that, too, away.
Not every critic has been hiding the film’s main secret. For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis let the (robotic) cat out of the bag, but said the twist didn’t add much beyond inviting an “unflattering comparison” to Charlie Kaufman’s 2008’s “Synecdoche, New York,” which was also about the interplay between theater, reality and obsession.
Faced with the rush of ominous headlines, and a Rotten Tomatoes score hovering around 50 percent, Warner Bros. pivoted to a new marketing strategy on Tuesday that was dubbed “phenomenal,” “insane” and “generational.” Distributors released a promo on social media that leaned intothe wildly different receptions to the film by contrasting reviews that alternatively described it as “unpleasant” and a “masterpiece,” “baffling” and “brilliant.” The idea, as Warner Bros. urged in their teaser, was for moviegoers to “decide for yourself.” (Some observers noted Paramount, which was recently approved by a judge to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery, tried a similar strategy with 2017’s “Mother”, another film with a marketing campaign that, as GQ noted at the time, had been “a massive trick, and some people are going to f*cking hate this movie as a result.”)
Amid the dizzying headlines around the film, which also stars Riz Ahmed as Digger’s top scientific advisor, Warner Bros. is now urging audiences to see what all the fuss is about.
Still, it may be too late to save what is essentially a massively expensive arthouse movie from becoming one of the year’s biggest flops. It certainly won’t help that many reviews for the film have been critical of the over-the-top acting, while failing to mention that Cruise and company are depicting characters who are playing things up for the stage. And those who dosee the movie may feel they’ve had the rug pulled out from them, as if some massive sheet of ice has given way.
But even if the ambition shown in “Digger” may be part of its undoing, it’s arguably still a noble one. The film is among the first of its kind to try to answer the question of what future generations will say about how we responded to the climate crisis. Whether or not the movie is a satire or a farce (a distinction the movie actually tries to parse), the portrait it paints is cartoonishly bleak, greedy and oafish. But won’t that also ultimately prove to be an apt one?
“They know the facts,” Digger says at one point. “The story is yet to be told.”
