Due out on 30 September, Digger marks the first collaboration between director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) and global star Tom Cruise. The world premiere has just taken place in London, red carpet and all, and the first reactions dropped at the same time. And the least we can say is that critics are a long way from unanimous on this much-anticipated Digger. Billed as a wildly outsized apocalyptic satire, the film is described variously as a bold and fascinating piece of work, but also as a messy, unpleasant or overly artificial one.
Tom Cruise as an utterly out-of-touch oil billionaire
In Digger, Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an immensely wealthy oil magnate who is as arrogant as he is oblivious, not least when it comes to the consequences of his business. After an incident on one of his drilling platforms in Greenland, a huge amount of methane is released while an enormous mass of ice breaks away from a glacier. That mass then threatens to trigger a climate disaster and a tsunami capable of devastating part of Europe. Beyond its subject matter around the climate fallout, Digger is one of Warner Bros.' big bets for the coming awards season. The film also marks Tom Cruise's return to a role leaning more towards drama and satire, after a decade spent largely in action blockbusters.
Around Tom Cruise, director Alejandro González Iñárritu has assembled a particularly strong cast, with Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. Riz Ahmed plays a scientist tasked with making sense of the disaster, while John Goodman takes on a distinctly singular US president — unhinged, not to put too fine a point on it — a bit of a blend of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
A film that divides opinion, and how
As for the reactions, Digger is a film that leaves nobody indifferent. Some journalists praise the ambition of the project, its visual choices and Alejandro González Iñárritu's determination to offer something very different from the usual Hollywood output, while others reckon that all that excess ends up smothering the story and the satire.
Clayton Davis, of Variety, feels the film is attempting something ambitious and singles out the work of Tom Cruise and John Goodman, as well as the cinematography and the art direction. But in his view, not all the pieces fit together, and the satire could have been pushed further. Jim Hemphill of IndieWire, by contrast, was particularly enthusiastic, going so far as to call Digger one of Tom Cruise's most striking performances since Magnolia, as well as a film that is rather inventive visually and conceptually.
Anne Thompson, also at IndieWire, talks of a film that may struggle to find its audience, particularly among what you'd call mainstream viewers. There are far harsher reactions too, which speak of an "unpleasant" film, or simply a failed one. Several journalists accuse Digger of favouring grandstanding and extravagant ideas at the expense of its storytelling and its faux-satirical tone. It now remains to be seen how the public will react to this atypical offering, in which Tom Cruise is all the more unrecognisable, sporting an enormous facial prosthetic. The make-up sessions required up to six hours of preparation. That said, if there's one point the first reactions seem to agree on, it's that Digger is unlikely to leave many people indifferent.
Digger arrives in cinemas on 30 September 2026.
