I have to give Alejandro G. Iñárritu some credit for Digger. He has enough intelligence to recognize the hypocrisy at play in climate hysteria. They point fingers and lay the blame all the while sucking carbon like a supercharged vacuum cleaner. Tom Cruise’s centerpiece monologue calls them out, and they don’t like it. That brief moment, like other brief flashes of brilliance, isn’t quite enough to save the waterlogged, delusional fantasy that might cap off the Peak Woke era.
If the existential crisis in Birdman was getting old and not wanting to do superhero movies, the existential crisis in Digger is most definitely Trump and the era he represents: post-2016 America.
Some spoilers:
You have to admire what Digger is trying to do. The structure of the script, a play within a play, the sets, the dystopian future touches. It reminds me of Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The End, which was also a grotesque climate-change farce. Digger has some awareness of what it is, though it should be said that both films implement a black female to bring in some kind of morality in a corrupt white world. You get me? Peak Woke.
Tom Cruise is brilliant as Digger. There’s just no other way to say it. The other great performance is Riz Ahmed, who very nearly steals the show. The rest of the cast, especially John Goodman, overplays – we don’t need loud and bombastic every second. Dr. Strangelove only had two sort of showy performances – George C. Scott and Peter Sellers. Everyone else played it straight.
Here, there are so many actors over-doing it, I wondered briefly if actors have forgotten how to act. But then the film addresses this, and we understand why they are performing that way, but we still have to endure all the screaming, shrieking, vomiting, farting, etc. Think: Birdman by way of Triangle of Sadness.
Jesse Plemons brings some humanity to the Trump-like villains in the story, and Iñárritu addresses something that disturbed me greatly. I have never been able to understand the blinding hatred from the Left against Trump and his supporters. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime. That people would openly pray and dream for Trump’s death, even after he’s been almost shot three times and Charlie Kirk was shot, is beyond anything I could have imagined.
I won’t spoil what this means, but you do get a glimpse of how they all see the death of their imaginary supervillain (all they ever had to do was win an election). Digger isn’t meant to be Trump exactly, but it’s the generalized view of the Left when it comes to Republicans. I had to do a lot of work to crawl out of that same worldview, that same hatred, and try to understand the people on the other side.
What I got from watching Digger and listening to the laughter of the blue-state liberals sitting in the theater with me is that it feels like entertainment for the Royal Court. They just want to be seen as the good guys and to be validated for their hatred of the other side. Even a film like this, as satirical and overdone as it is, seems to be made for them, which is why I find the reviews so baffling. I would think they would love it more.
I was part of the Left for the first four years. I was locked away in the Doomsday Bunker with them. But I noticed the mass hysteria coming fast and hard. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t go along with it. The swarms would come regularly as the mob purged the thought criminals to keep the village pure and righteous.
I would have a record of this evolution, but I purged my entire Twitter timeline after Rebecca Keegan decided my own political ideas would make a good “investigative piece,” and just like that, a 26-year career went up in flames. But none of that would ever make me regret choosing to escape the Doomsday Bunker and try to find some sanity outside it. We just have to wait for Hollywood to catch up, and I hope they will.
Once we’re through this era, it will be easier to see Digger, like One Battle After Another, like The Odyssey in some ways, as Peak Woke – notes at Empire’s end, the apocalyptic mass delusion of what evils lurk outside of the protective bubble. I give Digger much credit for almost getting there, for at least having one foot in reality, like Ari Aster’s Eddington, even if it ultimately confirms the mass delusion because it must.
And in those brief flickers, those moments, Digger is almost a great movie. It is so thrilling when someone rips through the bullshit we’ve all been forced to choke down for so long now. He reaches for it, scratches at the surface, but in the end, I think, it must do what all films do: pander and validate.
Without the politics infused in it, I might have enjoyed the movie more. I wanted to get lost in its magical surreality and Tom Cruise’s performance, but every time the politics presented itself, it pulled me out, which is always the problem for me with Peak Woke. Most people barely notice it.
I can’t pan the film. I can’t say it was terrible. I admired its artistic daring. I admired how creative the production was. The only sad lament is that it cost $180 million, and AI could make this movie with about $10K. That is our future. Movies like this, just like the big productions of the 1950s, are a thing of the past. Hollywood doesn’t have to spend that kind of money now on visual effects, sets, etc. And at some point, they won’t.
People always say that this film will be well regarded in the future, like movies that were panned at first, like The Big Lebowski. I don’t agree. I think people will look at this movie like they look at One Battle After Another and be able to finally see clearly what I can already see – that these are expressions of a movement that could not let go of power, walled themselves off into an insular bubble called the “resistance,” and went to war on half the country and Trump for ten years.
Digger is one of the best of this era, believe it or not. I think Tom Cruise will and should get an Oscar nomination. He’s so likable, even when — especially when — playing villains. I found I enjoyed hanging out with both Digger and the other role he plays in this film. He knocked it out of the park, gave his all, which is all you can expect from an actor.
If it weren’t for Andrew Scott in Elsinore, whose performance will be emotionally moving, whereas Cruise’s Digger isn’t so much, Tom Cruise would win. With a C+ CinemaScore and very bad headlines about the film bombing, he first has to clear the hurdle for a nomination, but he certainly deserves it.
So I guess in the end, I went in expecting to hate Digger. I sat po-faced and bitter for the first 30 minutes, but it started to win me over as it expanded its one-sided viewpoint. Tom Cruise’s monologue calling out the climate puritans and scolding them was worth the price of admission. THAT monologue will absolutely stand the test of time; as more sane minds prevail, they will look back at that moment and think: right on.
Despite that, I’m not sure I could endure this movie again. It’s not an easy sit. It’s also hard to justify a movie that cost $180 million. If you have that kind of money to burn just to take artistic risks, I’m not sure you are in any position to blame anyone for climate change. And the movie seems to understand this. It’s more or less saying, ” This is the end of the line, so why not enjoy ourselves?
