‘Digger’: Tom Cruise Plays Two Roles in a Stage Show About Climate Collapse, and the Film’s Own Irony Never Lands

In Digger, Tom Cruise takes on two parts, and the movie keeps reminding you of that fact. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the film stages a stage show inside a film about the stage show. The AV Club review calls the entire enterprise a cynical trick that fails to deliver.

What Happens Halfway Through

Half an hour into the film, the movie reveals its central twist. The Digger we’ve been watching — Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a real-life oilman — is actually a technical rehearsal for the 20th anniversary of Fossil Fools. That’s a stage show about the time Rockwell and his government friends ignored climate science to everyone’s ruin.

The film splits into two tracks from there. One follows the events of Fossil Fools, told in a washed-out, budget-heavy style that the review compares to Dr. Strangelove. The other follows the backstage drama, set sometime after climate collapse, as Cruise’s character Curtis Marks struggles with his daughter’s disappearance during the show’s opening night.

The Double Role Explained

The film casts Cruise as two roles: Rockwell and Curtis. Rockwell takes on the form of a physical manifestation of the prosthetics used by The Simpsons’ long-running oil tycoon Rich Texan. Curtis is the unhappy actor backstage, weighed down by Kazu Hiro’, while his daughter’s airplane disappears during a fatal storm on the very first night of her performance.

The review suggests this double role explains why Cruise saw the part. He gets to play a big, showy comedy while Iñárritu acknowledges that the show isn’t meant to be funny. Except, the review argues, that isn’t the only perspective Iñárritu offers.

Curtis’s Director Argues the Show Stinks

Curtis complains backstage about the movie the audience paid $15 to see. Hannah, played by Sophie Wilde, responds with “They’re laughing at you.”. The review reads this as the audience finding comfort in watching the guys who killed the world being the same idiots they imagined them to be.

The satire is a mess, according to the review, especially as Iñárritu layers on the reveals. The play’s financier turns out to be Rockwell’s nephew Kenny, played by Jesse Plemons, who has been waiting in the wings of the show he’s producing and who also appears in the show as Emma’s son, played by Sandra Hüller.

Kenny’s Argument

Kenny tells the cast and crew that Fossil Fools is funny, stupid, and precisely what people want to recall about the end of the world. He says he’s right. When Iñárritu shows the opening-night audience, there isn’t a dry eye in the full theater.

The distance between what the characters on screen feel and what the audience actually experiences watching the film runs wide enough to compare to a drifting ice shelf. According to the review, the picture pushes ahead without amusing or involving its real-life viewers, instead turning toward the people inside the story to show how the audience is meant to react.

The Ending

Digger ends with a standing ovation. Kenny has found Curtis’ daughter, the audience loved the show, and all the actors’ hard work paid off. Then the Level 4 audience puts on their gas masks and wanders back out into the flooded city outside.

The film is not a comedy about how the end of the world happened, the review argues. It’s a way for the rich to continue controlling the narrative. The Rockwell family writes Digger’s myth, and Kenny gets some absolution for his uncle’s crimes.

The Studio Connection

The review connects the film’s message to its own production. Warner Bros., the studio behind Digger, will soon be owned by Paramount, a sale partially financed by Paramount CEO David Ellison’s father, Larry, a Trump buddy who produces “profoundly scary technology” for wars all around the world.

A few hours are all Ellison needs to track down any plane, though his fiction remains poor and gets devoured by audiences who don’t think much about it. The review says Iñárritu’s point is that art, even when it appears to challenge those in power, serves merely as cover for them.

The Review’s Take

The review’s central claim is that the film’s structure is cynical. It undermines its own comedy, drama, and heavy-handed message by telling the audience how it’s supposed to feel while also calling them idiots for doing so. The backstage drama is meant to be a counterweight to the show’s stupidity, but it keeps contradicting itself.

The review criticizes the film for its assertion that art serves as the opiate of the masses. It describes the movie as a “awful $200 million Tom Cruise movie”, arguing that it employs poor art to pacify and control the public. According to the review, the irony lies in the fact that the film performs this function without acknowledgment, and with genuine sincerity, yet still fails to connect with its viewers.

Where the Review Lands

The review argues that Digger dresses its cynicism in satire’s clothing. It wants the audience to mock the wealthy, even as it demonstrates that the wealthy hold the power over what gets mocked. The review sees this as a contradiction rather than a clever maneuver.

The review also takes issue with the film’s message that art is the opiate of the masses. It calls the movie an “awful $200 million Tom Cruise movie” that uses bad art to keep the masses calm and in check. The irony, the review argues, is that the film does this anonymously and earnestly, ultimately failing to engage its audience.

The review’s verdict is sceptical. The structure is a trick, and the trick doesn’t land. The audience laughs at the show, but the film never quite earns that laughter, and the backstage drama never resolves the contradiction it creates.

See the video the story is built around at The A.V. Club.

Alejandro González Iñárritu · Digger · movie review · spoiler space · Tom Cruise