Digger Review: An Apocalyptic Spiritual Successor to Birdman
“When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.” – Gabriel García Márquez
At sixty-four years of age, Tom Cruise remains one of the most prominent and successful action stars in history. He is one of the few remaining true movie stars whose name alone can draw a crowd. It seems these days audiences have taken more notice of directors over actors like Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Mike Flanagan, and Zach Cregger to name a few (As a cinephile, I think this is good news. Time will tell.). But Cruise is seemingly a lasting remnant of a time when celebrity was king.
I believe a major reason for that is the projects he chooses. As a star-producer with his own production company, TC Productions, he retains absolute creative control. For someone who has demonstrated time and time again his profound love for cinema, this autonomy from tactless, business-minded executives allows his project choices to be made in the most mindful and impactful manner. He is most certainly business-smart but he seems to be driven by the art and aims to mold the business into the shape the art needs for it to blossom. He lets art drive business when so often it’s the other way around usually to a detrimental degree.
It’s the reason Top Gun: Maverick was so heavily focused on thrilling flying sequences and achieving the most incredible visuals in camera as much as humanly possible. It’s why when rumors start that he is wanting to shoot a movie in literal space people might scoff at the idea but rarely do they ever doubt that if anyone can pull it off, it’s Cruise. I believe he is the single greatest reason the M:I franchise became what it did. Aside from his on-camera charisma and unfathomable fearlessness, it’s who he ultimately surrounds himself with, repeatedly working with masters of their craft like Christopher McQuarrie(Mission:Impossible – Fallout), Joseph Kosinski(Top Gun: Maverick), and Doug Liman(Edge of Tomorrow).
And now we arrive at Digger and his most unexpected collaboration with Alejandro G. Iñárritu. With Digger, Cruise isn’t just reminding audiences of his acting range; he is screaming it from the rooftops, using a wildly transformative performance to violently shift the conversation away from his stunt work. For an entire generation, he has been the “stunt guy” achieving death defying stunts all for the spectacle of the cinematic experience. This feels like a reminder of what initially made him a household name. The Firm, Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut. And now, Digger.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu remains one of the most interesting voices in cinema today, and as a longtime admirer of his work, his highest peaks are thrilling to watch. However, his success is entirely contingent on whether he can maintain an equilibrium between challenging, avant-garde experimentation and a more accessible, crowd-pleasing narrative. With The Revenant, Iñárritu gave us a visceral, blood-soaked look at the brutal dawn of American frontier capitalism. Now, with Digger, he turns his lens to the opposite end of the timeline, capturing the ruined, flooded twilight of a society collapsed under its own greed. It is a fascinating, dual-ended commentary on human nature: proving that whether we are fighting the untamed wilderness of the past or navigating the toxic fallout of the future, our capacity for self-destruction remains entirely unchanged.
He struck that perfect balance with his 2014 Best Picture winner, Birdman, but missed the mark with his lesser-seen 2022 effort, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. With Birdman, he found the truth in ego, capturing the harsh reality of relevance and its impermanence. Bardo, by contrast, felt like a filmmaker completely consumed by his own scent—lost in his own sauce, so to speak, and driven by the arrogance that an audience will blindly follow along no matter how self-indulgent the creation.
I’m sure many will proclaim that Digger is firmly in the latter camp, with Iñárritu unable to get out of its own way. I would argue, however, that it belongs to the former—serving as a spiritual successor to Birdman with an apocalyptic twist that provides a scathing, simultaneously hilarious commentary on our current and probable future on this planet. It laughs, if only to keep from uncontrollable weeping, at the overwhelming corruption and incompetence of our elected officials. By pulling back the metaphorical curtain to reveal the world's true puppeteers, the film forcefully reminds us that money, above all else, makes the world go ’round—proving that its corrupting grip even bleeds into an existence where the very concept of currency should be entirely irrelevant, delivering the ultimate form of cosmic irony.
The secrets of Digger truly must be experienced to be believed. As the narrative unfolds, a singular, pivotal scene signals that things are about to get profoundly weird. From that moment on, the film embarks on a wildly unhinged, yet meticulously focused two-hour tangent that is all at once glorious, chaotic, and beautifully absurd. Yet, the plot never loses its footing; instead, it sharpens its core thesis through a series of narrative side-quests and dark allusions to what lies ahead—both for these characters and for us as a species. When critics were instructed to keep the film’s major revelations under wraps, I couldn't have imagined the sheer scale of what was in store. It is confidently bizarre and painfully funny in a 'we’re all going to die' sort of way, laying out the apocalyptic facts and asking a fundamental question: would you rather cry in despair, or secure one last laugh before everything falls apart?
As for Tom Cruise, his turn as Digger Rockwell is his most unexpected role since Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman. Hidden behind incredible prosthetic work, the character serves as Cruise’s ultimate free pass to deliver a performance that, while perhaps not quite as crass as Grossman, is every bit as boisterous and disquieting. Much like Grossman, Digger is detrimentally business-minded, placing profits above everything—including human survival. Rather than attempting to fix the catastrophic mistakes made by him and his wealthy cronies, he pours all his effort into simply spinning the narrative. He is utterly reprehensible, yet I couldn’t help but be charmed by his unhinged, Yosemite Sam-esque persona. Cruise is impeccable here, masterfully capturing the sheer arrogance and audacity of a man who believes he is all-powerful, only to learn his influence means less than nothing in the face of nature.
A frequent collaborator of Iñárritu, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki captures a potential future reality that visually echoes the distorted textures of Poor Things. While Ryan's work on the latter used hyper-saturation to build a fairytale, Lubezki pulls the audience out of reality using a drained color palette and a features-distorting perspective. The final result garners comparisons between the two; by utilizing extreme wide lenses and large-format cinematography, both films weaponize a sense of grandiose artifice to frame their worlds not as gritty documentaries, but as nightmarish, carnivalesque landscapes.
If there is one thing I am certain of with Digger, it’s that it will be one of the most divisive movies of the year. I predict audiences will fall into one of three distinct camps: they will love it, they will loathe it, or—in the most likely outcome—they will skip it entirely, continuing to complain about a lack of original content even as something as refreshingly unique as Digger stares them right in the face, daring them to watch.
Personally, Digger stands as one of the most uniquely distinct cinematic achievements of the year. It weaponizes a dazzling sense of macabre, unflinching cynicism, finding dark hilarity in our collective demise while choosing not to offer easy fixes, but rather to shine a blistering light on the sheer audacity of the wealthy few who have ultimately ruined it for the rest of us. Anchored by a tremendous, career-pivoting turn from Cruise, the film features stellar supporting performances from the likes of Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and John Goodman, who all help shape this exhilarating ride. Digger is a fierce, darkly funny piece of commentary that proudly echoes the brilliance of Birdman while absolutely carving out its own unforgettable voice.
Rated R For: pervasive language
Runtime: 129 minutes
After Credits Scene: No
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Starring: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller
Directed By: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Out of 10
Story: 10/ Acting: 10/ Directing: 9/ Visuals: 9
OVERALL: 9/10
Buy to Own: Yes.
Check out the trailer below:
