Alejandro González Iñárritu has never made a small film, and Digger doesn't break that streak — it just confirms that scale and ambition are different things. The premise is blunt: a paunchy Texan oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell, played by Cruise under layers of prosthetic baldness and a Slim Pickens drawl, triggers an Arctic ice-shelf disaster through irresponsible drilling. The ice floe — many times the size of Manhattan — is heading for Norway. It is, we're told, going to hit like a nuclear weapon. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make you feel the scale of that threat in flashes of genuinely unsettling imagery. Then the script opens its mouth. The film's satirical architecture borrows from the Dr. Strangelove playbook — crisis room, lunatic masculinity, institutional failure played as black comedy — but where Kubrick's film had surgical comic timing, Digger has volume. Cruise's Digger bulldozes his way into a White House crisis meeting chaired by John Goodman's gaunt, ailing President Compson, effectively seizes command, and delivers a barnstorming UN speech in which he flays the assembled diplomats for their addiction to the very oil they publicly despise. It's the film's set piece, and Cruise commits to it fully. The problem is the script hands him a ball and forgets to put any defenders on the field. Digger's claim that a transition to renewables — including nuclear — is simply not viable goes entirely unchallenged. Whether the film intends this as dramatic irony, bad-faith provocation, or genuine ambiguity is impossible to tell, because the satire never decides what it's actually satirizing. It seems to want us to reluctantly admire Digger's realism even as we condemn his destruction, but admiration without consequence is not dramatic tension — it's just a character study in search of a thesis. The film's analogy to Don't Look Up is apt: both are big-budget climate parables that mistake sincerity of concern for clarity of argument. The supporting cast is wasted with remarkable thoroughness. Riz Ahmed's chief scientist Ganesh is reduced to a prop — querulous, terrified, there to deliver exposition about the ice shelf and then disappear. Sandra Hüller, one of the most interesting screen presences working today, is given a half-sister role so hollowed out in the edit that her presence reads as contractual. Michael Stuhlbarg's vice president exists as a body in a suit. These are not actors who disappear into underpowered roles — their talent makes the thinness of the writing more visible, not less. Then the film lurches. There is a plot twist — the review is deliberately vague here — that explains some of the shrill, sketchy characterization but does not redeem it. The twist recontextualizes the action as something enclosed within inverted commas, a high-concept move that the film presents as a fait accompli rather than dramatizing. The effect is anticlimactic: instead of deepening the stakes, the reveal evacuates them. You are left watching performances that were already struggling to locate their register scramble to find a new one, without the scaffolding to support the shift. Lubezki's photography and Dennis Gassner's production design do genuine work here. The Arctic sequences are distorted, bulging, dreamlike in ways that sell the scale of ecological catastrophe better than any of the dialogue. The UN megaparliament — all grey suits and performative outrage — is visually precise satire. These moments remind you what this film could have been in more disciplined hands, or with a script that had the courage to commit to its own positions rather than gesturing at complexity it hasn't earned. Digger resonates with its political moment — Trump's appetite for Arctic oil exploitation is the obvious real-world target — but relevance is not craft. The film finds itself, as the Guardian's own reviewer notes, in a postmodern hole: a climate satire that critiques hypocrisy while declining to advocate for anything, a character study of a villain it half-admires, a formally ambitious film that uses its formal gambit to avoid the hard dramatic work. What do you do when you're in a hole? In Iñárritu's case, apparently: keep shooting on IMAX film and hope the images carry the argument.
