Tom Cruise Has Saved the World Enough Times. Digger Lets Him Destroy It.

Tom Cruise has spent the better part of two decades dangling from airplanes, climbing skyscrapers and saving the world. In Digger, he gets to destroy it.

There’s something oddly fitting about watching the Warner Bros. logo appear before Digger. With the Paramount / Warner Bros. merger now official, this may very well be one of the last times we see that familiar shield before a film. For a movie so obsessed with the collapse of civilization, the timing feels almost too perfect. Digger is about billionaires and corporations consolidating power while everyone else watches from the sidelines. It's pretty plain to see that Hollywood doing the same thing.

Digressions aside: Co-writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wildly ambitious satire stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a grotesquely wealthy oil tycoon whose company triggers an environmental catastrophe that threatens global civilization. As the planet edges toward collapse, Digger decides he might be the only person capable of saving humanity. Subtle, it is not.

Digger feels heavily inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) crashed into Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), with a little of John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977) thrown into the mix. If you look at Adam McKay's 2021 disaster satire Don’t Look Up, it uses a more straightforward, crowd-pleasing approach to satirize climate change, political incompetence, and our inability to react to an obvious disaster. Digger takes a stranger and more theatrical route; it is less interested in simply pointing fingers and more interested in the absurdity of the reality we’re trapped in, where the vicious circle of self-serving politicians and billionaires feeding into a public that demands the very things that keep a destructive machine running is what makes this movie interesting.

Cruise is terrific. Completely unhinged, he is physically transformed and unrecognizable beneath facial prosthetics, a heavy frame, gray hair, and a Southern drawl. It’s the rare chance to see the acotr trade the heroic action star for an aging tycoon whose ego is as massive as his bank account. He clearly understands the absurdity of the character and commits to it completely here. Co-star Riz Ahmed might be even better as the scientist desperately trying to make everyone understand the severity of what is happening, bringing a grounded humanity to an otherwise increasingly insane movie. Michael Stuhlbarg is another great addition to the cast as the vice-president, while John Goodman absolutely steals the show as a president who seems almost as dangerous as the disaster itself. Sound familiar enough?