Warning: This review will contain spoilers for the movie Digger. You have officially been warned. 

DIGGER IS A flop.

With a budget of roughly $180 million (€160.92 million) against an opening week box office return of around $25 million (€22.35 million), we already know enough to say that this film is a flop. 

A catastrophic flop, really, especially when one considers the laundry A-list of stars and beloved character actors who make up its cast, to say nothing of its Academy Award-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and its leading man, Tom Cruise. 

Cruise is an icon of modern cinema, though it’s been quite a while since he has starred in a film where the promotional material didn’t involve him hanging onto a plane mid-flight or driving a motorcycle off a cliff in a bid to convince us to go see it. 

Maybe there is an argument to be made, then, that Digger’s flop status is more so attributable to a failure of marketing than a failure of filmmaking. Maybe they should have had Tom Cruise scaling a glacier while pleading with us to buy tickets. Or maybe they could have made a trailer that didn’t conceal the core conceit of the film. 

The trailer makes Digger look like a big dumb film, but it’s much more complex than that. Tom Cruise, after all, does not play the eponymous Digger. Tom Cruise plays Curtis Markson, a famous theatre actor. It is Curtis Markson who plays Digger in a play, within the film. That play is based on a true story in-universe, wherein the eponymous oil tycoon Digger Rockwell caused a cataclysmic series of global catastrophes by drilling for oil in Greenland. 

The play-within-a-film structure is hidden from the audience until about 30 minutes into the film, which up until that point is an uncanny, hyperreal caricature of a world resembling ours, where a blustering and fanatical president played by John Goodman (or… played by the actor who’s played by John Goodman) and his all-white staff meatheadedly discuss bombing an ice-shelf to smithereens lest it head towards Europe. Goodman’s president is a buffoon, shored up by a team of moron military advisers who devise a plan to keep the approaching doomsday scenario secret from their European allies until it has displaced and killed millions of people.

The performances within the play are hammy and over-the-top because that’s what the director of the play wants. At one point, Markson and the director of the play (whose in-universe title is Fossil Fools) debate whether the play is a satire or a farce, a question that is only too applicable to the myriad dramas we witness unfolding in the corridors of power each day. This is a film not only about climate change and cannibalisation of earth as we know it, but also the way in which we make art about the many horrors that beset modern life. 

The message of the film is undeniably heavy-handed. There is no subterfuge here. It is Dr Strangelove for the 21st Century, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Tom. Through Digger’s monologue to a caricature of the European Parliament, the audience is forced to confront its own avarice and hypocrisy — living in a world whose comforts are predicated almost entirely upon the extraction of oil and the capitalistic forces that maintain the status quo.

It is maybe for this reason that the film has been battered by some critics as ‘smug’ or ‘self-satisfied’. It is probably those things, yes. Maybe it’s right to be. After all, this is a thoughtful film, well-scripted, well-acted, that demands something of its audience in terms of comprehension and attention — and nobody wants to see it. 

But Digger is a film that rewards attention. The play-within-the-film is constructed in such a way that shows a world in decay, petals falling from flowers in real-time, holes in the ceiling, a pet cat decomposing in Tom Cruise’s arms. This is our world, and it is recognisable even amongst the intentional ham-fisted style. 

It is an apocalypse movie set before, during and after the apocalypse. It would be a great film even if it weren’t such a keen representation of the cultural moment we face. But it is, even if the trailer doesn’t give that away.