Digger is as decisive as a movie can be. I have seen it twice now and still do not know how I feel about this film. Marketed as “the come watch Tom Cruise covered in prosthetics” movie, casual audiences knew nothing else about it before release. The main synopsis is that Tom Cruise is Digger Rockwell, an ultra-rich oil tycoon who drills right into a worldwide catastrophe. If you are a Cruise fan wanting to see him back in action giving a balls to the walls performance, you will be satisfied with that. He really does give one of the year’s best performances, it is also worth mentioning that Riz Ahmed gives an absolutely stellar supporting performance alongside him. But to talk any more about this movie’s plot and themes it is quite literally impossible to do without giving away huge plot points. From this point on there will be major spoilers.
For the first chunk of this film Inarritu tricks us into thinking we are watching a satire about these ridiculously behaving billionaires and politicians leading us right into a worldwide disaster, but the film flips this completely and reveals we are watching actors rehearse a play about Digger Rockwell. We go back and forth between Tom Cruise playing Digger and scenes where Tom Cruise is playing the actor of Digger. The scenes of the play are over the top exaggerations of how these people really are, a satire. Every time we come out of the play and see Cruise as the actor, he is squabbling with the director of the film saying that this is all wrong and messed up. He is right. The play is not funny, the characters are ridiculous caricatures of themselves, and they are doing things that could never possibly happen in the real world such as all of them being on the same plane as Cruise argues about. But the people need this play, the director argues, they need it to laugh at, process with, and to feel good about themselves that they are not responsible for this man-made world that they live in. The second huge twist of this film. The play is set in a post Digger Rockwell apocalyptic world. Immediately after we get the third huge twist of the film - the production is owned and run by a relative of Digger Rockwell. This character, Kenny, played by Jesse Plemons, then delivers a monologue about why he is putting on this performance for the people. He gets the actor of Digger to finish the play, we watch the last scene, see the actors come back to stage for applause, and the movie ends with the audience putting on their gas masks and walking out into a flooded, and destroyed world created by Digger Rockwell.
Whether or not this movie works is up to you to decide, but ultimately that is not the point. The point of this movie is that it is all pointless. A satire about satires. As much as it is an eat the rich, billionaires are bad type of movie, it is calling out the audience just as much. There is a monologue in the middle of the film delivered by Digger Rockwell where he says we don’t want him to stop digging. We all enjoy the comfort of our lives and the products we use every day, are we just going to stop living how we are? Absolutely not. What will we do though? How about going to see a satire movie making fun of these people for fucking us over? That will surely make a statement. In reality just like Kenny does by producing this play they are the ones profiting off our desire to take a stance against them in this way. They allow us to laugh at them, and to take pleasure that we are not them and we would never do the things they do. But it is not just us dealing with the consequences. In the movie the actor playing Digger is dealing with a personal crisis. His daughter is missing because a plane she was on had to reroute and is missing due to a tsunami. He does find her due to a new cybersecurity company Kenny has founded, but he is not without serious distress, and the never ending threat of something like this happening again. In the end the rich do stay in power, but they are not free. They too have to deal with the consequences of the world that they shape. We all do. It is everybody’s problem.