Digger is the kind of film major studios rarely make and audiences rarely receive: an unruly, purposefully overloaded satire about the destruction of the planet, shot at Pinewood Studios in VistaVision, starring the world’s biggest movie star in prosthetic makeup and a career-stretching performance, directed by a multiple Oscar winner who has never made a film quite like this one. It opens Friday from Warner Bros. It is rated R and runs two hours and eight minutes.
Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate so cartoonishly wealthy and morally unexamined that he lives in a mansion surrounded by taxidermy and polar bear rugs while lavishing his final resources on keeping his 30-year-old cat Maggie alive — the cat rendered by puppeteers as an animatronic creature so carefully staged it becomes the film’s most quietly devastating running gag. Virtually unrecognisable under prosthetic makeup by Oscar-winner Kazu Hiro, Cruise launches into the role with a torrent of good-ol’-boy dialogue, brandishing the shovel his grandfather started the family oil business with while talking drilling quotas and baseball metaphors. The grandfather clock ticks ominously in the background.
An explosion on one of Digger’s Greenland rigs frees an ice shelf five times the size of Washington DC. It drifts toward Europe, threatening catastrophic destruction. The President — a gleefully excessive John Goodman playing someone called Compson, the exclusively white, male, and decrepit cabinet gathered at Digger’s mansion to discuss the pickle — decides the only man who can fix this is the man who broke it. “Digger got us into this and now he is gonna dig ourselves out of it,” Compson proclaims, with the unearned confidence of a man who has never considered consequences.
What the Film Is Actually About
Digger is not really a disaster movie. It is a disaster movie about disaster movies — a satire of the genre that argues the real catastrophe is not the ice shelf but the systems and people that released it. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, working from a script he wrote with Birdman collaborators Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman, and Jez Butterworth, conceived the film in 2017 immediately after Trump’s first election and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. That nine years of revisions shows in the film’s density, its occasional frustrations, and its refusal to settle for a single tonal register.
The comparisons will come immediately: Dr. Strangelove, Don’t Look Up, even Birdman for its theatrical self-consciousness. All are accurate. Digger features a play-within-a-film structure that introduces itself early and initially feels like a pre-emptive defence against criticism — Iñárritu has used self-reflexive devices before to get ahead of his audience’s objections. Here, though, the structure eventually earns its place, opening the film up to questions about what satire can actually accomplish and pulling Cruise’s performance from caricature into something more genuinely affecting.
The film’s best sequence is a ten-minute Digger monologue before a UN-style body dressed entirely in pistachio green. He mounts an emphatic, not entirely irrational defence of oil — “the mother’s milk of Earth” — asking whether the world was truly prepared to go without it. It is a showstopper. Cruise has always been most interesting when portraying male ego at full throttle, from Magnolia to Tropic Thunder to Eyes Wide Shut. Digger belongs alongside those performances — but the quieter, more foreboding moments near the film’s end are what stay with you.
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Where It Works and Where It Doesn’t
The most frequent criticism Digger will face — and it is a fair one — is that for a satire, it is not always funny. Cruise is not Peter Sellers. Iñárritu is not Stanley Kubrick. Their effort to reach the pitch of Dr. Strangelove strains at points, and some set pieces land harder than others. The film’s hectic Iñárritu-esque tempo, typically its strength, can become a source of exhaustion before the second half’s darker direction clarifies what everything has been building toward.
The supporting cast helps considerably. Riz Ahmed is superb as Ganesh, the scientist who sees the disaster coming and cannot make anyone listen. Goodman is magnificent in full comic excess. Sandra Hüller does strong work as Emma, Digger’s sister, though the script gives her less to work with than the other principals. Jesse Plemons builds an extended enigma as Kenny, whose true role in the film only becomes clear later. Emma D’Arcy and Sophie Wilde add sharp supporting texture.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s VistaVision cinematography gives the entire film a larger-than-life, carnivalesque quality — filming from below to make Digger feel monumental, then subtly adjusting to make the same spaces feel like diorama reconstructions. Cosmo Sheldrake’s score keeps the tonal balance from collapsing. Production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson accomplish extraordinary work given that the film was shot entirely at Pinewood.
The Verdict
Digger is deliberately, productively divisive. It will not work for everyone — its demands on patience are real, its tonal ambitions occasionally exceed its execution, and some audiences will find the payoff when the end credits roll either moving or infuriating. But it is the kind of film that demonstrates what a major studio can do when it backs a genuine auteurist vision at scale. Warner Bros. has been doing this more consistently than its peers and Digger is the most ambitious evidence of that commitment in some time. Love it or hate it, it should not be ignored.
Digger opens in theatres nationwide on October 2, 2026.
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