Digger

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Oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) receives bad news from the team of his oil rig in Greenland. The excessive digging they have been conducting on the island by virtue of a backdoor deal spearheaded by the United States government has caused a build up of methane, resulting in an explosion that dislodges an ice shelf six times the size of Washington DC. According to scientific expert Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the ice shelf will be drifting southeast and is bound to collide with Norway’s southwestern coast in three days, unleashing a tsunami that will result in millions of deaths in coastal cities along the North Sea. An emergency meeting is held with President Compson (John Goodman) of the United States in which they discuss their options. Should they blow up the ice shelf? Warn Europe? Wash their hands clean of the responsibility? Their problem gets even more complicated when another ice shelf, this time on the Bering Strait, detaches itself and drifts straight toward a collision course with Alaska.

I don’t give a fvck what the critics are saying, this film is SICK, even though I understand why a lot of people will hate it. Reason #1 - the structure is kind of weird and meta. The movie you are seeing is revealed halfway through to be a technical rehearsal for a play. In short, Tom Cruise is not playing Rockwell Digger. He is playing an actor named Curtis Markson playing Rockwell Digger. The extra layer of detachment from the audience makes it a bit confusing. Think of it as some sort of behind the scenes documentary filmed like a movie. This also means that you are taken out of the material’s universe from time to time as they zoom out to show the theater sets.

Reason #2 - Digger is a narrative about climate change, a touchy topic that people tend to immediately dismiss because the truth of the matter is that we are all contributing to it, no matter how we vilify the gazillionaires who are often blamed for such global tragedies, though not without reason. This film tends to come across as either too preachy or too on the nose, which probably explains why reactions are polarized, on top of the confusing framing structure of the narrative. As some anti-critic reviews are saying, this is the type of film that you will hate now but will end up liking after a decade or so. Cult classic in the making.

The thing about Alejandro González Iñárritu is that regardless how polarizing his films are, they ALWAYS end up with Academy Award acting nominations: Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro in 2003’s 21 Grams; Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza in 2006’s Babel; Javier Bardem in 2010’s Biutiful; Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone in 2014’s Birdman; Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2015’s The Revenant, which also served as DiCaprio’s long-awaited career Oscar win. For Digger, Tom Cruise and Sandra Hüller are among the early frontrunners for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress nominations.

We are used to Cruise being a box-office actor. He seldom stars in awards-baity films. His role in Digger is one of the rare instances, and he kills it. Considering that most of the Academy voters will also likely consider this as a cumulative career nomination, he is a shoo-in, in my opinion. Hüller is fantastic as always but severely underutilized. It doesn’t help that her character is not the type that you’ll miss when not onscreen. If we are looking for a supporting nod for Hüller that is worthy of a nomination, Project Hail Mary is probably the safer bet. If anything, it is Ahmed as Ganesh who should be getting all the nods for supporting.

Despite the material being confusing, I actually think it’s clever how the theater piece and the actual post-apocalyptic world the film is set in effectively complement one another. At the same time it is ironic AF that the theater piece which provides the backstory responsible for the state of affairs in the world outside that theater also continues to provide relevance to the family of the guy they are lampooning. The world almost ended and yet the elite that are blamed for causing it are still the ones pulling the strings in the end. Relevance is currency. Business as usual. Wild.