By the end of the film’s opening weekend, the moniker of “biggest Hollywood flop of the Twenty-First Century” was already being bestowed on Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger. But perhaps it’s more accurate to call it Tom Cruise’s Digger, as the film’s star and producer was the project’s most high-profile participant, and it’s not very close. Cruise has spent twenty years rehabilitating his image after jumping on Oprah’s couch in 2005 (and all of the Scientology-fueled eccentricity that it represented), and that rehab has almost exclusively meant starring in aggressively commercial, often action, movies in which his dedication to doing his own death-defying stunts has consumed much of those films’ press. The Tom Cruise of Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia – an era where he both took reputational risk and, more crucially, was willing to be directed – seemed like a performer long forgotten, both by the public as well as the actor himself.

This is all optics. We have the Cruise who was the star of high-octane action films and the Cruise who was the star of prestige adult dramas. In either type of movie, Cruise is defined by his intensity. That is, an intensity of commitment physical and emotional; an acting style that thoroughly shows its work to the point of dissuading any dissent, though there is plenty. The greatest cinematic triumphs of his post-2005 career (2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick) were all pitched to the masses, made for the purpose of great box office. Those are three great films with three great performances from Cruise. Edge of Tomorrow disappointed money-wise at the time but is appropriately appreciated today, the other two were smashes. All’s to say, Cruise, the truly talented actor has never gone away, it’s simply the type of movie that he appeared in. Those adult dramas he used to act in? They no longer exist in the Hollywood ecosystem.

Which brings us to Digger which is the closest Cruise could probably ever come to something like an adult drama in 2026. This is the eighth feature film from Iñárritu. The Mexican filmmaker began as a crafter of ensemble melodrama, often collaborating with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, to make miserabilist tragedies with grandstanding themes. Iñárritu’s career shifted greatly with 2014’s Birdman, which won Best Picture and gained him his first of two back-to-back Best Director Oscars. By the time he won his second statue for the striking but arduous The Revenant in 2016, he had already began to field accusations of being overrated and certainly over-rewarded. His next film, 2022’s Bardo, was a return to Spanish language filmmaking, a surrealist, autobiographical film that was so aggressively pretentious and uncommercial, that it confirmed to his legion of enemies everything that was wrong with him. Of course, Bardo is, in my eyes, the best film he ever made.

So this is the baggage we bring to Digger, a film headed by two maximalists eager not only to be taken seriously but to also confirm their own larger-than-life images of themselves. It’s a recipe for the kind of schadenfreude that only comes around once in a generation, as both of these giant egos have hordes of people ready to watch them hoist themselves upon their own petards. And that is what Cruise and Iñárritu did, to be clear. The fact that Digger is actually very good is beside the point. The film’s script (which has five different credited writers, including Iñárritu) is actively antagonistic toward its audience, pontificates with the didacticism of late era Paddy Chayefsky, and then has the nerve to add a narrative element thirty minutes in that is so destabilizing that it’s all but begging you to interrogate why, in fact, you’re even watching this in the first place.

I’ll confess, a large part of what I like about Digger is the shameless overconfidence it takes simply to conjure it, let alone produce it into a feature film released by one of the great Hollywood studios. (This will, unceremoniously, be the final Warner Bros feature release before the merger with Paramount Skydance goes through.) In its simplest form, Digger is a satire about the oncoming climate disaster and those responsible for it. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate with extreme political influence whose arctic drilling has just triggered a major natural catastrophe set to wipe out a large portion of Europe. There were several desperate warnings from underlings that Digger, of course, ignored, and he doesn’t even think to consider the ramifications until confronted with the hard facts by Dr. Nirav Ginesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s head of environmental safety. Ginesh explains, with great worry, that the time has passed for preemptive care, we must now prepare for the worst.

Digger organizes a meeting with President Compson (John Goodman), a high-strung, far right fundamentalist, and the rest of his cabinet. A absurdist roundtable conversation often marked by panicked screaming proceeds where lots of high-minded remarks are made but the substance of the meeting is simple: how do we avoid the accountability that is so obviously ours? Compson’s military men (Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman) suggest blowing the sliding ice shelf out of the water. Ginesh quickly chimes in that that would just create more, smaller but equally if not more destructive, climate events. Eddie (Michaael Stuhlbarg), the weasel-y vice president, seems overwhelmed by any action that would require effort from him. Digger’s sister, Emma (Sandra Huller), is upset as this really puts a damper on her own newly launched company, which was meant to be the environmentally-conscious corollary to Digger’s oil company.

The moment you think that you can’t handle any more hysterical elitists screaming about consequences that they’ll never legitimately face, Iñárritu shifts Digger substantially. This is meant to be a surprise to the audience, though it occurs pretty early. I won’t spoil it here, but I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to note that this creative choice – ultimately the entire thematic crux of the film – is the source of most of the anger that audiences and critics alike have felt for this movie. The film’s first act, a grating torrent of blowhard whining where all characters are painted with the ashen gray features of the very recently deceased, is an obvious satire about oncoming climate catastrophe and those ultimately responsible. These sequences make very didactic points using increasingly cartoonish political caricatures. As the film shifts, Digger becomes something even more maddening: it becomes a film about how we’re all – every active participant in the first world – part of the same hypocrisy that has made our current moment such an emergency.

How woefully cynical. And certainly, one would think, there must be a gentler, more hospitable way to make this point? The political consciousness that Digger most explicitly explores is, yes, American conservative, but it also recognizes that what defines the citizens of the entire Western world is a refusal to accept the increasingly perilous reality coming toward us, as well as the unbreakable belief, however conscious or subconscious, in our own unproven (and unchallenged) greatness. These are things we don’t really want to consider, and Digger doesn’t even really put it up for debate. It’s just the way it is. What Digger and Iñárritu, and to a lesser degree Cruise, are actually interested in is how art plays a part in all of this. If we are fated for a future of tech companies offering individualized solace while everything around us rapidly crumbles, what is the value in a film or a play or a performance?

Despite all the creative trappings that Digger constructs around itself, I did find its message to be incredibly clear, if unsubtle. The bluntness of its methods are intentional, and the unlikability of its characters part of the point. Consider Don’t Look Up, the decade’s other big budget climate satire. That movie gratuitously agonizes metaphor, and ultimately blames a lack of public interest for the death of our planet. Digger tells us that that lack of interest is baked into the political strategy from both sides of the aisle. Until its final moments, Digger doesn’t give us much of a working class perspective, and when it does, the image is chilling, giving us a morbid view of what something like survival can look like. Iñárritu is giving us the opposite of Don’t Look Up, showing us that our institutions, even the ones that claim to be on our side, have provided us with only one option: withstand the environmental assault by accepting their board-approved distractions.

Let’s get back to Cruise. This is a genuine risk from the actor. And it’s the kind of risk many of his stature would be unwilling to take. Him choosing this role speaks to his addiction to thrills just as much as any Mission: Impossible role. Digger Rockwell is a villain so hooked on his own sense of importance that he appears mentally incapable of envisioning his own downfall. It’s impossible to give you a spoiler-free explanation as to how and why Cruise performs this so brilliantly, how he manages (as he always does) to make this performance about Tom Cruise even more than it’s about Digger Rockwell. Digger is an incredibly dangerous man responsible for direct harm on the human race, but he is also a bogeyman erected by the public to give our own existential terror a tangible body. Cruise’s performance touches all these notes, and he manages to stay true to the character even as the screenplay’s complicated, meta-fictional elements threaten to get in the way. There ends up being little difference between the way Cruise conjures Digger Rockwell and the way he conjures Ethan Hunt, even if the ultimate result couldn’t feel more different. And that is what separates Cruise from his contemporaries. His willingness to go that far.

The clarity of seeing Digger after it’s declared a historic failure means that you can watch the movie and realize that there was never a world in which this film was meant to be a commercial success. That said, the degree to which it cratered is still surprising. In fact, there is so much to talk about Digger‘s thematic ambition versus it’s box office death, that it leaves very little room to speak to the incredible work of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, or the first time feature score from composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Not to mention the incredible performance from Jesse Plemons, whose performance recalls Ned Beatty in Network, without the garrulous bluster. His entire character is a spoiler, and maybe that’s my biggest complaint about Digger. Keeping the entire structure of your film a deliberate secret means that even the people who don’t like it feel compelled to not talk about the film’s most interesting aspect. It’s proven an ultimately fatal choice in the short run, though I suspect Digger will find its audience over time. That is, if Warner Bros/Paramount/Skydance makes something like that possible.

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Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu