Maybe it sounds like a joke: a blockbuster climate satire in which Tom Cruise wears prosthetics and plays a cartoonish, bellowing American oilman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu with a budget big enough to fund a small country, and currently speeding toward one of the greatest box-office bombs in cinema history. Who would want to see that? The answer, strange as it may seem, is absolutely you. I say this as someone who went in expecting a heavy-handed, celebrity-heavy lecture and came out with my expectations permanently rewired. “Digger” is not merely a satirical romp about climate change. It is a wildly uncomfortable, structurally audacious, deliberately ugly film that asks questions most movies do not dare to ask. What is the point of art in a world that is ending? What is the point of telling the truth when capitalism has already monetized the disaster? And why do we need our climate villains to be monstrous caricatures rather than ordinary people embedded in an extraordinary system? The film does not provide easy answers. It just makes you sit in the wreckage of the question. It is also, in its own bizarre way, strangely human. It understands that we laugh at catastrophe because the alternative is to be crushed by it. Before going further, a warning: if you plan to see “Digger,” I strongly urge you to stop reading and go see it first. There is a twist, and knowing it in advance will not ruin the film exactly, but it will change the experience. Trust the process. Let the movie break through your defenses.
The world of “Digger” first appears glorious in its bad taste. Tom Cruise inhabits Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who refuses to wear any shoe except cowboy boots, and whose mansion is a grotesque shrine to conquest: antlers on every wall, polar bear skins on the floors. He is the kind of mythic American who thinks of nature as raw material and niceties as weakness. Early on, one of his offshore drilling platforms accidentally dislodges a massive iceberg, releasing a devastating methane leak. With an iceberg drifting toward Europe and the planet spiraling into crisis, he has to alert the president, played by John Goodman in a performance that channels his best Coen brothers energy—a mixture of buffoonery and menace. The trailers sell this as a ferociously broad satire: an American oilman, a Trump-flavored religious-right administration, a catastrophe borne entirely of greed and denial. Then, about twenty minutes in, Iñárritu reveals his secret. The farce we are watching is actually a play being performed inside a crumbling theater, with a leaky ceiling and failing power. Tom Cruise is not Digger Rockwell. He is an actor playing Digger Rockwell. The play itself, called “Fossil Fools,” is based on events that happened decades earlier, in our near future, and the audience watching it lives in a world that did not solve the problem. Suddenly every laugh, every grotesque gesture, every villainous line is aimed at two audiences at once: us, settling into our seats in 2026, and the fictional people of a broken tomorrow, watching the story of how their world was lost. That twist turns the whole film into a kind of haunted echo. We are not watching an event; we are watching a memory, a performance, a warning that was apparently not enough.
The obvious comparison is to Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” the 2021 Netflix smash that used a comet as a stand-in for climate catastrophe and starred a cast of A-listers trying to wake up the public. McKay said his goal was to make people less tolerant of inaction from their leaders. His film assumed that if we could properly inform people about the threat, things would change. “Digger” shares some of that DNA. It is packed with climate misinformation: Digger admits he ignored his own company’s warnings, and Goodman’s president deploys a “firewall” to scrub all mention of the crisis from public discussion, banning terms like “Al Gore” as if the phrase itself were a disease. But Iñárritu’s film is after something darker. The fact that the story is being performed in a dystopian future means that informing people did not save them. The truth did not stop the iceberg. The comedy did not fix the leak. Yet there they are, still performing the story, still insisting that someone should have listened. That detail changes everything. It means the film is not simply a warning, but an elegy for the genre of warnings. We keep telling the truth because that is what human beings do, not necessarily because it changes the outcome. It is a deeply unsettling thought, and one that most climate films refuse to touch. They prefer to end with hope, with a call to action, with the possibility of redemption. “Digger” offers no such comfort. It suggests that storytelling is not a solution but a necessity, a way of keeping the moral imagination alive even when it is too late.
This leads to the movie’s most uncomfortable question: which characters are we comfortable making into climate villains? “Digger” offers us Digger Rockwell, a man so easy to hate he practically wears a sign. He is crude, greedy, and delusional, the kind of oilman we can boo and hiss without any moral complication. The play-within-a-film structure, though, forces us to see him as a performer, a role being played by an actor, and therefore as a product of something bigger. He is not an anomaly; he is the logical endpoint of a system that rewards extraction and denial. The audience inside the play is not innocent either. They live in the future that Digger helped create, and they are watching a cartoon about it, perhaps for comfort. And what about us, in the real movie theater? We are also consuming climate catastrophe as entertainment. We want the villain to be a cowboy-hatted billionaire so that we can feel morally superior without changing anything. If the problem is just a few evil men, then the rest of us can be spectators. “Digger” refuses to allow that comfort. It suggests that we are all complicit, that the capitalist machine churns through all of us, and that the line between villain and audience is blurrier than we would like. That is why the film feels so personal, so accusatory. It does not let you sit back and enjoy the destruction. It forces you to ask whether your own laughter is part of the problem, whether your own desire for simple villains is just another way of looking away.
There is no way around the fact that “Digger” is a mess, and a deliberately expensive one. Tom Cruise’s performance is loud, grotesque, and almost impossible to reconcile with his usual movie-star persona. John Goodman is the only actor who feels like a human being, and even he is a tragic fool. The budget is enormous, the imagery is ostentatious, and the tone is all over the place. Critics have panned it. Audiences have stayed away. The box-office projections are catastrophic. But perhaps that failure is the point. A film this critical of capitalism was never going to be a major crowd-pleaser; it was never going to make shareholders happy or satisfy investors. The very existence of “Digger”—a massively funded, recklessly ambitious, leftist, existential, bizarre fable about the end of the world—is almost a miracle. We are used to climate movies that are earnest, beautiful, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful enough to make us cry without making us change. “Digger” is none of those things. It is ugly, insane, and difficult to love. It feels like something that should not have been allowed to exist, and maybe that is why we need it. It is the kind of film that could only be made by a director with enough ego and enough desperation to burn his reputation on a project that no one asked for. It is a self-immolating artifact, a monument to the idea that art can still be dangerous, strange, and true.
So should you see it? Absolutely. Not because it is a good movie in the usual sense, and not because it will offer you a satisfying conclusion. See it because it will scramble your expectations about what climate art can be. See it because it asks whether telling the truth has any power, and then answers with a strange, stubborn hope: we tell the truth anyway. The play goes on, even with the roof leaking and the power failing. The actors keep performing, and the audience keeps watching, because that is what we do. We create stories not always to save ourselves, but to remember what mattered. “Digger” is a Looney Tunes cartoon for a dying planet, a bloated expensive joke that may well sink its own studio’s finances, but it is also a genuine work of moral imagination. It forces you to ask not just “What would I have done?” but “What am I doing right now?” It makes you laugh, and then it makes you feel sick for laughing. It humanizes the crisis not by making it tender, but by making it absurd, and in doing so it captures something real about the way we live through disasters: we joke, we deflect, we buy tickets to comedies about our own destruction. That is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the film. If that is not a reason to see a movie, nothing is. Go before you read another word about it—go to have your expectations rewired, to be made uncomfortable, to sit in the dark with the absurd, tragic, human truth. Just do not expect to walk out feeling clean. You will not be. And that is exactly the point.
