Digger and the Theater of Power
A review of the 2026 satirical black comedy film Digger directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise and John Goodman, released by Warner Bros.
The people running the world in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger have mastered everything except the job. They can command a room and invoke a higher purpose. Faced with an environmental catastrophe after an Arctic drilling accident has sent an enormous iceberg toward Europe, however, they struggle to work out what to do. The spectacle of their inadequacy makes for a wonderfully unnerving comedy: the world has assembled an extraordinary concentration of power and entrusted it to people who seem barely able to manage a meeting.
But there is much more to the film than that. Its marketing presents a comedy about an environmental disaster caused by a vain, out-of-touch billionaire. Twice, however, Digger takes a turn so ambitious and wild that revealing either would spoil the viewing experience.
Digger reminds me of the movies I would watch as a kid with my mom in the theater. If you go the bathroom or to get soda, you’ve missed critical scenes—when you get back to your seat you ask “what happened, what did I miss?” and it’s just not possible to explain. It is a brilliant movie, and you’ll be thinking about it for a long time. Go not knowing anything about it and avoid spoilers at all costs. This review was written so as not to give away too much of what makes the film so delightful to watch on the big screen.
For much of the film, Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging oil magnate whose drilling operation has unleashed a vast mass of Arctic ice the size of Maryland that threatens to collide with Western Europe in three days, causing massive tidal waves across the North Sea. His attempts to confront the crisis bring him into contact with scientific advisers, the American political establishment (notably U.S. President Compson, starring John Goodman), and a European Parliament that has considerable trouble distinguishing a persuasive speaker from a responsible one. Across these encounters, Iñárritu keeps returning to a dispiriting mismatch between the qualities that win power and those required to exercise it.
Cruise’s casting gives that mismatch a particular bite. His screen presence has so often promised that the impossible will get done. Here, the same confidence belongs to a man whose sense of his own importance has outrun his judgment. Digger can be appalling and still hold our attention; indeed, his ability to do so is central to the problem.
John Goodman is superb as U.S. President Compson, who suggests a grotesque composite of Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump. The resemblance belongs to an entire exhausted political class as much as to any individual. Goodman makes the presidency feel immense and its occupant conspicuously unequal to it—old, out of touch, and physically incapable. The scientific advisers fare little better in practice. They struggle to explain the impending danger in terms their listeners (Digger, the president, military leaders) can grasp and turn their knowledge into a course of action. Being better informed than the president proves insufficient to change anything, to say the least.
The public’s perception of the crisis seems to trouble the administration more than the crisis itself. What ought to be a search for solutions acquires the queasy logic of a public-relations meeting held during a fire—significant time is spent on managing the perception of the crisis on social media.
A hilarious scene in which Digger and his environmental scientist eat tuna brings the same instinct to the dinner table. The film punctures the mystique of organic food, with the reassuring story attached to the meal appearing to count for more than any meaningful difference in what is on the plate. Conscientious consumption becomes another way of buying a flattering picture of oneself.
Religion supplies another familiar aid to authority. The kitsch piety that adorns the highest reaches of government lends their earthly ambitions a borrowed grandeur.
The military-industrial complex, meanwhile, has little difficulty finding its way into the proceedings. Its ability to remain indispensable seems far more dependable than anyone’s ability to solve the problem. Religion supplies another familiar aid to authority. The kitsch piety that adorns the highest reaches of government lends their earthly ambitions a borrowed grandeur. There is something especially funny, and rather chilling, about the ease with which the powerful recruit God only for it to make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
The European Parliament sequence gives these failures their most concentrated expression. Its members demand explanations—from the U.S. administration, from scientific experts, even from Digger—yet seem incapable of much more than that. The U.S. Vice President and the expert are booed, while Digger gets some laughs. Indeed, the man whose business caused the catastrophe understands the room better than the people attempting to warn it. A chamber ostensibly devoted to deliberation behaves like an audience waiting for a good act. Cruise’s command of the scene (arguably the highlight of the entire film) implicates the viewer in it. We, too, can appreciate a well-delivered insult more readily than a complicated explanation.
What many of us, including our leaders, ultimately care about in difficult circumstances is not finding a solution, but placing the blame on someone else.
Digger’s charge of hypocrisy has enough force to unsettle the easy pleasure of watching a villain expose himself. He accuses Europe of regulating energy production out of its own backyard while continuing to buy the product from elsewhere. The legislators’ confidence in their safeguards runs up against a disaster that observes no borders. They can regulate what happens within their jurisdiction; the catastrophe is under no obligation to recognize it. Confronted with the consequences, they appear hopelessly ill-prepared. The scene gives Digger a damaging point and leaves his culpability intact. Someone else’s hypocrisy offers him a line of attack, rather than an alibi. It’s a meaningful scene, which shows that what many of us, including our leaders, ultimately care about in difficult circumstances is not finding a solution, but placing the blame on someone else.
The European Parliament building itself, visibly dilapidated, depicts the issue very well: An institution presuming to safeguard the future seems unable to maintain its own premises, down to a wilting flower and leaking roof. Outside, as environmental catastrophe approaches, demonstrators gather to protest… genocide. The juxtaposition is deliberately abrasive. The public, like its leaders, has trouble departing from the performance it knows.
The apparent exception is Kenny (Jesse Plemons), a technology magnate with a distinctly Palantir-like aura. He seems capable of getting something done, which gives him an almost indecent appeal in this company. His presence makes our longing for competent authority uncomfortable. After so much dithering, we may be grateful enough for efficiency to stop asking whose selfish purpose it serves—and Kenny is, indeed, the reason for much of what we see unfold in the film.
Without revealing too much about how the narrative of Digger is constructed, it’s fair to say Iñárritu repeatedly pulls back to reveal the machinery behind the spectacle. These shifts make our own behavior difficult to ignore. We enjoy the humiliations and choose our favorites, responding to matters of collective survival with partisan enthusiasm. A film that has encouraged us to recognize the incompetence of its characters starts to progressively expose our pleasure in recognizing it. When Digger dies before the audience in the film (this will make sense once you see the movie), the spectators shout “Fuck you, Digger!” in unison. Their anger registers as some sort of understanding of what just happened while giving them the comfortable sensation of having done something about it when, as the next scene reveals, they did not and could not have done absolutely anything meaningful.
The film looks and sounds magnificent. Working in the old VistaVision format (a short-lived high-resolution motion-picture film format from the 1950s), cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki gives these assemblies of powerful and ultimately powerless people a visual elegance that makes their antics all the more disconcerting. The wide-angle compositions (with a changing aspect ratio!) let us study the performers and the spaces that confer their authority. Color and light carry meaning in each scene, while metallic clangs in the sound design jolt us out of easy contemplation. Image and sound work together to give the theatrical form a wonderfully physical presence. The beauty of the spectacle helps explain why we want to keep watching, even as we come to distrust the show.
Even Digger’s devotion to his ailing cat, Maggie, is an interesting metaphor. The pet has acquired the standing of a child, and keeping her alive becomes an undertaking of extravagant expense and dubious mercy. The animal suffers without understanding the interventions meant to save her. Maggie can be read as a miniature of the public, helpless before decisions made on her behalf and oblivious to the actual machinery that determines her fate.
Digger has the openness to interpretation that gives great art its staying power. Its politics resist a single label because its scrutiny keeps moving, eventually reaching the person in the seat just before the end credits. That gives the film a life well beyond its topical targets. You may enter the theater expecting to recognize the people running the world, or a condescending diatribe about environmental disaster.
You leave having been given an unexpectedly good look at yourself.