Digger is Actually Pretty Good

An actor, playing an actor, who's pretending to be a fake oil magnate named Digger Rockwell, addressing the film's version of the European Union.

I saw director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's newest film "Digger" on a whim. I remember seeing the trailer several months ago and being reminded of Stanley Kubrick's classic war satire, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", but giving the preview little more thought than that. Then, after getting off of work one day and driving past a local Cinemark, I saw the poster for the film now in playing in theaters. Almost without another thought, I pulled into the parking lot and bought a ticket on my phone. It wasn't even until I was already in the building and using the restroom before the screening that I realized that I was actually familiar with two of the director's previous films: "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" and "The Revenant". I had reasonably fond memories of both of these films, even if neither were my favorite film of the year or anything like that. But, when I was turning off my phone while walking into the theater, I had pretty high hopes for the movie, despite the fact that all I remembered from the trailer was the image of a cat somehow still breathing, despite being well past Death's door.

To put it briefly: I left the film getting exactly what I felt what I had paid for; a few hours of laughs at the expense of fictionalized versions of both America's current political leadership and business class, as well as basically every other character type that appears in the film. I didn't find the film to be perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But considering that the only other film I've bothered to watch in theaters this years was Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey", Digger might have actually sneaked it's way into a spot as one of my favorite film's of 2026. It wasn't until I was perusing YouTube earlier today and saw videos from both Man Carrying Things & The Critical Drinker poking fun at the film, that I even realized that this was a controversial take, but I really liked Digger.

It does seem worth mentioning that Digger is, in my opinion, no where close to as good as the film that it seemed to be trying to follow in the footsteps of based on the early trailers: Dr. Strangelove. Both films are satirical lambastings of the military and political establishment, and both films feature explosions and cataclysmic outcomes based almost entirely on the actions of an incompetent American government. But beyond that there aren't a whole lot of similarities between the two. Digger, much to my surprise, ended up being, not a hit piece aimed at Trump, Musk and company, but rather film with a strong message about climate change, and our collective societal refusal to actually move with the aggression required to prevent some of the worst predicted outcomes, though I don't know that this was made clear in the early trailers. In fact, many of the complaints about Digger do seem to stem from the fact that the marketing doesn't line up with what the film actually is.

Slim Pickens on an Atom bomb behind the scenes of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The biggest problem with the film however is not the marketing, but rather the unneeded complexity of the story-line. I guess the writer's threw out the K.I.S.S. rule early in the process, because not only does Digger attempt to satirize, Trump's administration, the billionaire class of capitalists in America, climate change activists, climate change deniers, Hollywood, and probably a few other groups that I can't recall; the film also adds a whole level of meta weirdness on top of what was already a weird film by having Tom Cruise's Digger Rockwell be, not actually Digger Rockwell, but an actor portraying Digger in a play that's being funded by the actual Digger Rockwell's nephew, while the actor playing Digger Rockwell's daughter is potentially dying on a plane crash ultimately caused by the actions of the real Digger Rockwell a few decades in the past. If that ridiculous run-on sentence sounded trippy and needlessly complex, now you have a good idea of what watching Digger feels like. However weird all of that is though, the film was still genuinely hilarious throughout most of it's run time. This should not be surprising, what with John Goodman playing the President of the United States, both Riz Ahmed and Sandra Hüller also playing equally effective side characters, and pairing it all with what is a legitimately amazing performance from Tom Cruise. I don't even think the most aggressive critics of Digger would disagree that it boasts some incredible acting work.

Yet, to hear the rest of the world tell it, Digger is one of the worst films of the year, and maybe the worst of Cruise's career. At the very least the film is not doing the numbers that it needed to break even. Digger made barely over $8 million on it's opening weekend and only a little over $35 million dollars internationally as of the time of writing, on a budget that was reported to be $125 million before marketing or any other production costs. Digger is virtually guaranteed to be a box office bomb of epic proportions. But the fact that the film isn't popular isn't all that surprising to me. Iñárritu's previous film, "Birdman" only managed to not be an epic bomb in it's own right because it was made with a scrappy budget of $18 million, and while "The Revenant" did make over half a billion dollars internationally as an R-rated film (cleanly in the top twenty of all time), it did so with an all-star cast including Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domnhall Gleeson and, most importantly, Leonard DiCaprio when he was in full please give me an Oscar mode, and a wildly more interesting premise: a damn bear attack. Digger was every bit as much of an art-house and experimental film as Iñárritu's previous work, and I think the trailers and VistaVision marketing made it clear that it would be that from the start. What I can't quite wrap my head around is the folks who saw the film, and hated it.

Some of the backlash is certainly due to the film's political satire. Armond White, of the National Review for example was no fan of Digger. As stupid as I think is to be such a big fan of a political administration that you can't even laugh at a joke about the absurdities present within said administration, this back-lash isn't exactly surprising. But Hollywood's critics aren't exactly know for being big fans of the Republican party, and certainly not Donald Trump's administration specifically, yet, even among that crowd, Digger was only able to scrape together 53% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film's 74% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.4 stars on IMdB might be early clues towards this film's status as a potential cult classic. But that feels a bit unlikely based on the current discourse surrounding the film. Even those who enjoyed the film, myself included, seem to lead any discussion about the film by making fun of the marketing or leading with the parts of the movie that missed the mark.

At least a little bit of the criticism around the film seems to be fully misguided. For example, in The Critical Drinker video that I mentioned earlier, I found that much of what Jordan complained about: the lack of any interest in examining or critiquing Hollywood and it's filmmaker's, simply didn't reflect what I saw in the film. As far as I can tell, the entire point of Jesse Plemons' character in the film, was to act as a counter-balance to Tom Cruise's absurd depiction of Digger Rockwell and Sophie Wilde's almost equally absurd role as the art is the most important thing in the world-style director of the play that the film centers around. I suppose it is possible that Digger has unreported varied versions, the same way that "Clue" shipped to theaters with multiple endings, but I doubt it. More likely, I think most normal folks that didn't care for the movie, didn't like it simply because of how overly-convoluted the story and it's messaging truly are. A fair point, I think, as this is precisely the same criticism that I have of the film. I do think however, that much of this undue complexity is actually part of the film's charm.

Digger's comedy, and particularly it's political messaging is more reminiscent of something like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" than it is "Dr. Strangelove", or even more recent straight-satires like "The Colbert Report" or "The Death of Stalin". The film, as much as it might be mistaken for any of Hollywood's recent other efforts at political propaganda, is simply not that. Digger satirizes the current political administration and the people over-reacting to them, climate change activists and climate change deniers, artists and the people who think art is useless, even the film's most despicable character, Digger Rockwell himself, the man who sends a iceberg barreling towards Europe and another one towards Alaska causing the literal apocalypse, is not without his sympathetic side. Certainly, it might be a reasonable criticism to say that the film refuses to take a stand on anything, and is only interested in making jokes. I for one would claim that it's more accurate to say that Digger is simply a satire in the purest sense, and isn't interested in letting anyone out of it's cross-hairs. Most importantly however, Digger does exactly what a good film is supposed to do: entertain us for a few hours, and provide a few good laughs along the way.