When I first saw a preview for Digger, I thought it would be a survivalist movie, with Tom Cruise playing some guy who looked like he had walked out of an episode of Doomsday Bunkers. Turns out I was wrong on the specifics, but more or less right on the overall vibe. Digger is about the disaster survivalists cravenly fear and fervently hope will happen. The twist is that the survivalists get swept away by the disaster they alone caused, rather than thriving in its aftermath. All the rest of us: we’re the ones who make it through alive. More or less.
Spoilers ahead.
There’s a scene maybe halfway through Digger where Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the head of environmental safety at Rockwell International, tells his boss and a Cabinet War Room what will happen if they decide to bomb the massive iceberg calved after a complicated chain reaction of preventable disasters started in their Greenland oil fields. It will break apart like a Russian doll, he reports, splintering into dozens of angry matryoshkas themselves stuffed full of long-dormant superviruses and decades of highly radioactive waste.
That’s more or less Digger in a nutshell: it breaches like an apocalyptic iceberg, Alejandro González Iñárritu and his crew blow their initial premise to bits with a series of metacinematic bombs that unleash a ferocious horde of pregnant ideas like miniature tsunamis at our late capitalist brains, . It’s like Wes Anderson on a cocktail of amphetamine and ketamine. AI tells me that’s called a “kitty flip”. If you’ve seen the film already, you know how apt that term is here. Digger is oversaturated, relentlessly paced, engrossing enough to get lost in, and clings to life like grim death.
It seems fitting that the only lead actor who is immediately recognizable—Jesse Plemons—is the only one whose actual identity is hidden until a late twist. It even took me quite a while to realize the familiar face I was watching as Digger’s half-sister Emma was German superstar Sandra Hüller, hidden in plain sight beneath a brace of aggressive Americanisms. John Goodman is cadaverously unhinged as the American president suffering from anal cancer and a Jesus complex, something he urges us to consider as one and the same thing.
Then there is Tom Cruise, somewhere in there, as Digger Rockwell. There was a single scene, near the end, where I briefly but unmistakably caught a glimpse of that famously earnest gaze from somewhere within the prosthetics, wig, and makeup he looks like he was born with. It’s a brilliant performance, made all the more so by the fact that Cruise turns out to be playing Curtis Markson, a British actor playing Digger in a bleakly satirical and lavishly produced West End play about the events we’re watching unfold. The play is being revived 25 years after its premiere, in an abandoned theater somewhere in post-apocalyptic Europe, where the long-dead Digger’s glacial disregard for the future had calved.
Digger, as I suspected early on and as the film later confirms, is speculative fiction. González Iñárritu would probably respond that you could say that about pretty much anything these days, to which I couldn’t mount much of a counterargument. Pressed by a frantic President Compson to give him certainty about what the floating iceberg will do, Ganesh can only respond with rough probabilities. Science, we are reminded, no matter how grounded in what can be known, always ends up in the realm of hypotheses and uncertainties—of speculation.
Well, yes, except what Digger is speculating about is not what will happen, but how bad it will be. The movie world we find ourselves in segues almost imperceptibly from an absurdist present to a future that is just like the present, not so much qualitatively worse as more degraded and degrading. There’s more flooding, the masks are higher tech, some of the security is robotic, and the phones look funkier, but it’s just as bad.
That’s the way the world ends. Too many people die, like they always have, and the rest continue, like they always have. Alas, yes, the powers that be are still the powers that be. Digger’s an antihero supervillain who more or less destroys the world. You could say the same thing about a whole bunch of the real world’s steel magnates, oil executives, autocrats, and tech bros over the last century and a half.
With an animatronic white longhair cat named Maggie that could have escaped from a nightmare stop-action animation short and has lingered at death’s door for decades, with those Natural History Museum-worthy dioramas in place of natural vistas, with that shovel mounted above a fireplace mantelpiece to memorialize Rockwell’s first oil well—Digger’s decadent mansion is like a derelict fun house of sick movie capitalists and tycoons past. Hell, his surviving nephew, when not busy running a cutting-edge surveillance company, is happily artwashing his family’s ill-gotten gains in the theater.
This degradation of a future that demands we notice the degradation of the present deeply informs this film’s style. A key effect of Digger’s metacinematic twists is to motivate a radically inconsistent use of real-seeming CGI. Instead, González Iñárritu shifts thrillingly between more or less convincing disaster effects (at least to the degree to which our brains have been trained to see them as “realistic”) and patently theatrical stagecraft. There’s no discernible pattern; it’s off-kilter throughout.
Instead, he trains us from the opening scene—a curtain rising on a landscape painting masquerading as a picture window—to watch for painted scenery, puppet-felines, and prosthetized actors. We accept them as real, suspending disbelief as we have been taught to do, while also registering them as fakes, performances, effects. Then, at unexpected moments, González Iñárritu breaks the opposite of the fourth wall with the “realism” we have come to expect from disaster movies, what we usually think of as verisimilitude made strange by what has come before.
We watch the spectacle of the world ending, but we are distanced from full immersion; our disbelief is only partially suspended. We watch the spectacle of Tom Cruise’s bravura acting, but we cannot fully experience him as “Tom Cruise”. At times, Digger feels like empty metafiction, play within play with no meaning in sight. At other times, the layers pile up like so many disasters into an unexpected revelation of the world we inhabit, grinding its wheels as it careens towards a catastrophe most of its inhabitants have been living all their lives.
There’s no way offstage for viewers, most likely, but there’s an undeniable pleasure in watching the long-suffering maidservant Adelia (Mercedes Hernández) blithely wave goodbye to her abusive employer. We see her through a window of the oil-rig set so that we can imagine her walking out through the wings rather than, as Digger will soon do, bellyflopping into the PVC waves of the “North Sea”.
We get another momentary, welcome release from the fevered grip of Digger’s perspective when the camera cuts from his deranged vision of the cornucopia he has summoned by praying to the frozen remains of the dead President. The camera revisits the massive walk-in refrigerator, this time from the point of view of Digger’s Mexican chef (Ángel López-Silva). Compson’s body is still stuffed into an upright freezer, but otherwise the cupboard is bare. I like to think of this as González Iñárritu’s sly dig at Cruise’s Scientological leanings; regardless, it’s a neat reminder of what the .1% see when they look into their larders and what the other 99.9% actually get, despite what the Diggers of the world insist should be there.
The film’s ornate meta-structure gives free rein to allegorical speculation within the many folds of its nesting plots. At the same time, it buffers the shrillness of Digger’s didactic core. This effect is especially evident in the long episode where Ganesh (named for the Hindu god of new beginnings) and Digger testify before the European Council. The sequence involves a breathtakingly cynical (albeit not unlikely) scenario in which Digger encourages Ganesh to tell the truth about Rockwell International’s cover-up not only of its advance knowledge of the tsunami but also of its never-released data about climate change from many decades prior.
Digger then takes the mic, corroborates everything his head of environmental safety has “revealed”, and confronts the delegates with the hypocrisy of a society unable to shake its addiction to fossil fuels. A scant few of the hundreds of delegates violently storm the floor; the remainder are persuaded to change their boos and jeers to riotous applause.
More layers cloak this sermon than have transformed Cruise’s impossibly fit torso into Donald Trump-like blubber. González Iñárritu stages the confrontation as a literal circus, the speakers in the center of a round indoor arena with steeply pitched seats, hyped one after the other like pro wrestlers by a manic ring announcer. The delegates wear pale earth tones that fade into each other and the background, their blandness making Digger pop in his burgundy leisure suit and cowboy boots. That is, until the scene’s end, when the camera adjusts its filter, and they dissolve into “realistic” colors as Digger exits to cheers, the world turned cynically “real” around him.
Then there’s the green room where Ganesh and Digger await their turns. It’s expansive and luxurious, albeit in the muted style of a 1970s Eastern-bloc hotel. One wall stands out: a full-scale mural of a snowy landscape complete with a glacier-encrusted peak. Hidden in the middle of it, except when opened, is the door to the arena through which the actors enter and exit, on cue.
González Iñárritu uses backstage machinations and an anti-realist mise-en-scène to distance viewers from the monologue that should be the Digger’s heart and soul. The tactic creates space for viewers to register the diatribe against corporate greed. The cynicism of the moment, however, equally encourages us not to listen critically to the facile arguments with which Digger dismisses what is, in the world we actually inhabit, a thriving alternative energy industry.
These in-scene choices are further layered with the formal and temporal reveals encircling the real-time action we’re in the middle of. We are aware by now we’re watching not “history” unfolding but a play satirically imagining that history. We don’t know yet, but soon will learn that the film’s “present day” is not, in fact, an imagined 2026 but an indeterminate future in which what we thought was a satirically exaggerated disaster à la Adam Mckay‘s 2021 satire Don’t Look Up turns out to be what has already happened more than 25 years in the story’s past.
Even the play itself, the cleverly titled Fossil Fools, is a revival for an audience nostalgic for its initially hard-hitting impact as a timely satire that let a traumatized elite audience laugh at the absurdity of the apocalypse they’ve been living through and are now stuck in forever. This reveal is consistent with the backdrops and trompe-l’oeils we’ve been studying in Digger’s mansion. In retrospect, we recognize them as emblems of his obscene wealth and the changed world. He’s wealthy enough to afford fake nature, but even he can’t get the real thing anymore. By the end of Digger, I wondered if the animatronic Maggie was not just a humorous device allowing a series of delightfully dark deadpan kitty flips, but material evidence of a world in which actual cats no longer existed.
That’s perhaps a more productive uncertainty than the eventually numbing layers surrounding González Iñárritu’s message of doom. I felt like I was watching where Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove would be if extended into 2026. Sixty-odd years after Slim Pickens began World War III straddling a nuclear bomb somewhere over Siberia, we’re stuck in whatever world had survived the cataclysm that Kubrick left us to imagine.
Well, Digger tells viewers, that would be about right. Kubrick’s masterpiece was made and released a few years after the first industry research and the first (internal) industry warning about climate change in the late 1950s. A few years after its release, broader research and a more detailed report circulated detailing rising CO2 levels and warnings of severe global risks like melting ice caps and rising sea levels in the late 1960s.[1] We got Dr. Strangelove; they got science.
There is likely, in other words, a method to Digger’s madness. It fucks with time and space more or less the way that the fossil fuel industry has been doing since the 1950s, persuading populations to displace endlessly into the future a fight over the validity of catastrophic knowledge already confirmed back in the past. Speculative fiction and alternate futurisms are the work of narrating and pushing back against the lies and inequities linear storytelling has so often helped perpetuate. It’s not that time isn’t moving, and the clock isn’t ticking. It’s not that the world isn’t ending. It always is, always has been, and always will be. It’s all, as Digger tells Ganesh, in how we tell the story.
Movies that dig out folds in the space-time continuum, from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) or the original Planet of the Apes sequence to half the oeuvre of Christopher Nolan, mine this vein of temporal paradox. With Digger, González Iñárritu wants to re-function the genre without its sci-fi trappings to retell a history of the past 70 years that more or less gets us to where we already are. What we’re supposed to take away from it is anybody’s guess.
“Look what they’ve done to my song, ma,” Melanie complains about the entertainment industry over the closing credits in a hit B-side from 1970. “Look what they’ve done to my brain, ma,” she continues. “Well they picked it like a chicken bone / and I think I’m half insane, ma.”
The needle drop choice certainly encourages the viewer to turn back into Digger‘s folds for answers, although González Iñárritu had full creative control over his film in ways the 23-year-old folk singer never would. “What Have They Done to My Song” would soon be licensed in commercials for Lifebuoy soap, Ramada Inn, and Oatmeal Crisp cereal.
Metafiction has become increasingly inevitable over the more-or-less seven decades Digger excavates on screen. One can luxuriate and lose one’s mind in the endless paradoxes, referencing loops, and rabbit- or wormholes. Or one can take them as an invitation to see the past anew, sift through what we thought our history was to understand our present differently, and find other futures we might inhabit. It’s not a happy task, and Digger is not a happy film. Still, there’s a future in it, which is more than can be said for most postapocalyptic fictions. Indeed, it has a future, a present, and a past.
Digger is the essence of baroque. Not just in the sense that it’s a still life tableau packed with gorgeous detail, reminding us of the fleeting nature of life and the vanity of human desires, and not just in its trompe l’oeil fascination with worlds within fake worlds, all of which look more or less as real as a reality that feels ever more fake. I mean, the credits, once Melanie’s gorgeous protest against commercialism finishes, play over all the ambient sounds of nature we’re currently in the process of losing: frogs, crickets, who knows what else. They’ll probably be digitally generated in our future, but who cares. At least we still get to hear them as they vanish.
The baroque I’m thinking of is the one the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin contrasted with the perfect catharsis of tragedy, the baroque in which the world goes off the rails, collapsing under the weight of its own conceits and conceits within conceits, the piling up of disaster after disaster. “For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction,” he argued, “in which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon allegorical contemplation.”[2] We need only think of the final incarnation of Maggie, as a prop cat, her furry head twisted off offstage and put on again backward in a scene that, had she been rendered as a persuasive CGI, would be intolerably traumatic.
For Benjamin, the essence of the mourning-play was how its excesses cracked the frame of the world it depicted in “the frenzy of destruction”, breaking apart its illusion of wholeness and meaningful progression into fragments of multiple overlapping and conflicting meanings legible only as allegories of something else. Like the lush animal sounds that close the credits, Maggie, throughout the film, is both alive and dead. To understand the world in this way, Benjamin thought, would allow us finally to see the disaster for what it was, and, perhaps, if not to live through it, which is always in doubt, then at least to live with it.
[1] Charlotte Taylor, “Defense, Denial, and Disinformation: Uncovering the Oil Industry’s Early Knowledge of Climate Change,” Common Home, October 25, 2023; The Center for Climate Integrity, “Big Oil knew as early as 1954”. 2026.
[2] Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. Verso. 1998 [1928].