published October 1, 2026
Frustrating. Annoying. Colorful. Wild. Deep. Invigorating. Digger is swing-for-the-fences filmmaking that – after a couple strikes – smacks an ultra-rare in-the-park grand slam.
Okay. Enough with the baseball metaphors. Baseball has exactly nothing to do with Digger.
But writing about Digger is a challenge because it turns into a 128-minute spoiler ride.
So here it goes.
For starters, it requires patience.
The first third of the movie generates quite a bit of butt fidgeting. Can a movie be fascinating, fun to watch and utterly annoying all at the same time? For the first 30 minutes, that’s the case here.
Sure, there’s a vivid imagination afoot. The visuals are so eye-popping, there’s a whiff of Wes Anderson in the air.
And, in that vein, there’s also an extreme sense of artifice that starts to wear down the patience.
There’s hope for something awesome. But that hope starts to evaporate. Frustration sets in. Then the collision of remarkable visuals, immaculately detailed settings, extremely quirky characters, goofy – at times borderline slapstick – humor, and lots of noise (water dripping into buckets, talkin’ ‘bout you here) yields to a growing sense of exasperation. At this point, the movie’s musical score turns into the equivalent of fingernails making a slow, painful stroll across a chalkboard.
Where are we?
Where is all this going?
Who are we?
What’s up with Tom Cruise?
What’s up with the bizarre “30-year-old” cat wearing pink gingham diapers? Has that megalomaniac Ernst Stavro Blofeld called? Does he want it back?
For the love of all that’s cinema, is this going down as another Mickey 17?
Then there’s a big reveal.
The movie turns on a dime. Things start getting interesting.
And – more importantly – things start to make sense.
Then, two-thirds through, there’s another big reveal and everything gels together spectacularly.
Even that ridiculous, crazy, strange, bruised cat.
If you suffer from any sort of anxiety – particularly regarding the state of the world today – Digger might not be the movie for you. So many of the world’s troubles come to the fore: the environment, global warming, natural disasters, geo-political tensions, crass personalities, economic turmoil, zombie viruses, nuclear waste, mass confusion, imperial versus metric, racism, sexism, censorship, religion. The world is falling apart and this movie captures it. At one point, it truly feels like the world is a lost, hopeless cause. Yet, somehow, referring to Digger as a zeitgeist movie isn’t the compliment it could be.
Given how Digger starts getting punchy with its messaging, it’s certain to anger some people.
With that, it’s also the kind of movie plenty of people will no doubt hate. It’s a reaction easy enough to understand. And yet, certainly others will relish its grand vision and it’ll strike a cinematic chord.
So many ideas. So much piling on. This is an aggressively creative – borderline cathartic – release of staggering proportions.
The inventiveness on display makes names like Terry Gilliam and Guillermo Del Toro pop into the mind. So does Francis Ford Coppola and his own maligned masterpiece Megalopolis. And, for good measure, throw in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Essentially, Digger colorfully tells the tale of an oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell and an environmental disaster with a devastating global impact that starts with a burst pipe at one of his sites.
But there’s a clever, intricate conceit surrounding how his tale is told. Think of it as dual-layered, with a sidebar tangent that binds it all together in a way that says, “Yeah. The world’s in big doo-doo. But, hey, maybe we can work together…?”
Maybe?
It’s easy enough to describe Digger as having a pro-environment agenda. But some might miss how it’s an “equal opportunity offender” kind of movie with plenty of finger-pointing to go around. And that’s part of what pushes it over the top. It’s smart. And it’s also a story so imaginatively, magnificently told.
Director and co-writer Alejandro G. Inarritu is known for taking those big swings. He’s the Oscar-winning director of The Revenant and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). He led Leonardo DiCaprio to an Oscar for Revenant and Michael Keaton to an Oscar nomination for Birdman. Will similar success follow for Tom Cruise? That’s a tough one to say. Cruise is worthy, but Digger is a pricklier experience than the other two.
Cruise certainly creates a larger-than-life character that’s more complex than even the over-the-top marketing indicates. His introduction captures him as a Howard Hughes type loaded with semi-mad eccentricities. It’s also interesting to consider how it figures into his own beliefs in Scientology and his most famous movies, particularly the patriotic Top Gun duo and his role as a Vietnam vet in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of the July. (Cruise also went through remarkable on-screen character-building transformations in Tropic Thunder and Rock of Ages.) This is certainly Cruise’s most political movie, one packing vicious, biting satire.
As the situation escalates and one catastrophe leads to an even bigger fiasco, Digger takes a stand and delivers a grand, alarming, profane speech bringing home the movie’s punch. It’s that equal-opportunity punch.
Digger calls out basically everybody. We’re all – he asserts – complicit in turning the world into its current state. What about all those politicians (and celebrities) who espouse environmental action but fly around in private jets? None of them are carpooling or riding bicycles, he observes.
Going further, politicians at all levels around the world profit off Digger’s companies.
The hardest bite to swallow is the thought environmental catastrophe is the price of doing business, as Digger piles it on. Nobody really wants the drilling to stop, he says, because they want their TikTok and YouTube. They want to ask AI to solve for disasters it’s fueling.
Their own lives are unsustainable.
Basically, no one appreciates the true complexity of the problem. Or is willing to admit it.
It’s a lot like other societal ills. (It could be argued nobody really wants to solve the healthcare problem, for one. But that’s another topic for another time.)
Perhaps the most challenging line some will hear in this entire movie is also undeniably accurate: “You are all right. You are both right.”
Set aside the politics and all those anxiety-inducing threats. There’s another component to Digger that makes it special.
In equal measures to the political themes that tear apart the world, there’s a remarkably cool artistic bent that seeks to bring the world back together. That’s really – at least from a certain point of view – the whole crux of the Digger experience.
So, through that lens, Digger turns into an examination of what is – and is not – art.
Yes. In the thick of all that political turmoil, Digger (the movie, not the character) is challenging the very purpose of art and its place in culture and the community. And there’s the notion of art as a unifying force.
Ultimately, Digger is a broad, over-the-top satire that tries to make today’s headlines and controversies more palatable in a colorful, outrageous presentation. And that style, that sensibility is brought home as the end credits begin to role.
A folksy song with theme-appropriate lyrics kicks in. “Look what they’ve done to my sun, my brain.”
But even that end-credits song is interrupted by alarms and then the sounds of crickets and frogs. It’s a slick stab at completing the immersion that is Digger.
Take a look at the writing credits for Digger.
Sabina Berman and Jez Butterworth are playwrights. Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone and Innaritu collaborated on Birdman.
Maybe some folks need to step back and consider Digger as a work of art first and a political statement second.
Much has been made – justifiably so – of how Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was filmed entirely with IMAX film cameras and yet there are only 41 theatres in the entire world equipped to present the movie with IMAX 70mm film projectors.
Well, at least in this regard, Alejandro Inarritu has one-upped Nolan. Inarritu shot Digger in VistaVision, an alternative, high-resolution 35mm film format created back in 1954. The image quality is super-sharp and so richly detailed.
Among the all-time classics shot in the format are Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest; John Ford’s The Searchers; and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Big names and big movies supporting a big frame. And now, in 2026, some 70 years after its heyday, there are only four theatres in the entire world capable of presenting Digger with VistaVision projectors. Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theatre in Los Angeles is one of them. The Academy Museum recently hosted a series of VistaVision movies with a temporary projector installation.
What’s up with that?
Get past the eye-popping low numbers of properly equipped theatres. That immediately gives those venues an exclusive status that’s hard to top. (The Odyssey ran an astonishing 11 weeks in IMAX film theatres. It’s a remarkable feat in a theatrical marketplace that sees movies transitioning from theatrical to streaming sometimes only in a matter of days.)
The aspect (beyond the aspect ratio) that needs to be appreciated and embraced is that these filmmakers are digging into the roots of the creative filmmaking process, revisiting – and rebuilding – lost arts that revitalize filmmaking during both production and theatrical presentation. These are things that bring those tactile, human elements back into the overall experience after the digital revolution effectively dumbed down so much of virtually every step of the process. Who knows how much further down the drain AI will take things.
Sure, the digital revolution now means anybody with an iPhone can make a “movie.” It’s great to democratize the technology. To a point. But to shoot in IMAX film and VistaVision? Well, you have to know what you’re doing.