Tom Cruise is playing a man who digs oil out of the ground, and the movie wants you to know he’s not the hero. Digger, the new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, is a strange beast: it opens with Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a wealthy oilman whose drilling in Greenland triggers a global disaster. Then, about 40 minutes in, the floor drops out from underneath the audience. It turns out we’re not watching Digger at all. We’re watching Tom Cruise play Curtis Markson, an actor rehearsing a play called Fossil Fools.
The twist is almost entirely concealed in the marketing campaign, which is rare in today’s trailers. Instead of selling the reveal, the film lets it land cold. And it lands.
The Play Within the Play
The film introduces Digger’s vast mansion and the disaster his oil rig in Greenland causes. Then a prop fails, and the movie pulls back the curtain. Everything we’ve seen — the mansion, the disaster, the oil rig itself — is a tech rehearsal. Cruise is Curtis Markson, a famous actor trying to figure out how to play a caricature of a villain.
Markson is distracted by the news that his daughter’s flight hit a weather delay. She can’t be reached. The actors break, and the rehearsal resumes. The play is an enormous, immersive production with vast sets and extras, the kind of spectacle that makes audiences forget they’re sitting in a theater.
The Disaster Inside the Play
In the world of Fossil Fools, the Greenland disaster floods many European cities with horrific loss of life. Digger admits his role but absolves himself, giving a speech about how the whole world thirsts for oil and deserves the convenience it brings. Shortly after, an ice shelf breaks off a Russian glacier and heads toward Alaska. The U.S. plans to nuke the glacier, but one of Digger’s scientists predicts it won’t stop the disaster.
The movie follows these events as they unfold in the rehearsal. The play-within-the-film is a commentary on the disaster itself, a satirical portrait of the man who caused it.
Who Produced the Play
The play’s rightsholder and benefactor is Digger’s nephew Kenny, played by Jesse Plemons. Kenny hopes a massive production will help the public process their rage and grief over what has been done to the world. He also uses his rich-guy contacts to find Markson’s daughter, who is safe and sound.
The play is being mounted inside an enormous facility, and the film explains that extras aren’t usually part of a theatrical production. The production is costly, and the sets are vast.
The Ending
The play ends with Digger killing himself to riotous applause from a packed house. Curtis quiets his own objections that the play is a cartoonish distortion of the real events. The bottom line is simple: ice shelves really did break off due to oil-drilling and caused widespread destruction. We see evidence of this as the audience files out of the theater, putting on elaborate gas masks to walk through flooded, waste-strewn streets that look post-apocalyptic.
Neither of Cruise’s characters saves the day. Digger causes the disaster and dies for it. Curtis can’t rescue his daughter or change the world he’s living in. The film’s irony is complete: the man who spent his career pretending to save the world is the one who actually caused it.
“We see evidence of this as the audience files out of the theater, placing elaborate gas masks on their faces as they make their way through flooded and waste-strewn streets that look post-apocalyptic.”
The Studio’s False Promise
The studio sold Digger as a movie about Cruise’s character racing to stop a disaster he inadvertently caused. That promise is broken. Digger does no such thing. He simply goes along as the U.S. President, played by John Goodman, cycles through grotesquely ineffective plans.
Cruise has been playing at saving the world for years, especially in his signature Mission: Impossible series. Digger turns out to be even more dismissive, casting him as both the cause of the disaster and the actor who can only recreate and exaggerate it.
The Box Office Flop
The movie bombed in its opening weekend. Audiences responded with seeming puzzlement, not just at the idea of Cruise parading around in bulky prosthetics and old-age makeup. Some of that doubtless has to do with the concealed element of the film. Trailers are often instructed to give away as much as possible, but Digger kept its secret hidden.
What the Film Says
Digger is a bold, audacious piece of filmmaking. It asks the audience to sit through a play-within-a-play and trust that the payoff is worth it. The film is sometimes confounding, sometimes inventive, and generally worth seeing for its discussion-starting audacity.
The irony is the point. The man who played the hero is the villain, and the man who played the villain dies a hero. It’s a clever construction, and the ending lands well.
Key Facts
- Film: Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
- Lead: Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell / Curtis Markson
- Supporting: Jesse Plemons as Kenny, John Goodman as the U.S. President
- Twist: The entire film is a rehearsal for a play called Fossil Fools
- Disaster: Oil drilling in Greenland floods European cities; an ice shelf threatens Alaska
- Ending: Digger kills himself to applause; the world is flooded and ruined
The film’s honesty is refreshing. It tells the audience what it’s doing from the start, even if the trailer didn’t. The result is a movie that rewards patience and punishes anyone expecting a traditional action hero.
Source material: “‘Digger’ Ending Explained: Does Tom Cruise Save the Day? Everything You Need to Know About the Box Office Flop,” Decider.
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