Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger is easily one of my favorite movies of 2026.
That’s not to say it’s a good movie.
I honestly don’t know if it’s a good movie or not.
It might be terrible.
Or… it might be brilliant?
I don’t think it’s brilliant, but… maybe?
Whatever Digger is, it’s a HUGE creative swing, and I think that’s worth applauding. In the days since I’ve seen it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Recent films that are objectively superior have claimed far less real estate in my mind.
What makes Digger such a mess… and why is that mess actually more admirable than any number of better-executed narratives released this year?
Why don’t we… dig in?
(See what I did there?)
PART I: THE LOOMING SHADOW OF KUBRICK (NO SPOILERS)
Digger is about Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), a billionaire oil tycoon whose irresponsible drilling practices lead to a climate disaster that kills scores of people. Working in concert with the President of the United States (John Goodman), a climatologist (Riz Ahmed), and, briefly, his sister (Sandra Hüller), Digger proceeds to try and mitigate the effects of his accidental apocalypse — from a P.R. and criminal standpoint, if not a humanistic one.
It’s a satire about climate change, not unlike Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021); also like Don’t Look Up, it’s lousy.
The makers of both films have cited Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, as a key influence on their work. Which makes sense: Dr. Strangelove, on the off chance you’ve never seen it, is a satire about nuclear holocaust, made at a time when nuclear holocaust was an especially real threat — the same way climate change is an especially real threat today.
Dr. Strangelove was initially intended to be a drama. Like many of Kubrick’s most famous films, it’s based on literary inspiration — in this case, Peter George’s Red Alert, a 1958 novel about nuclear war that is decidedly not a comedy. The movie Kubrick first set out to make was more akin to Fail Safe, the Sydney Lumet thriller released later that very same year, which ends with the destruction of both New York City and Moscow.
Then Kubrick started to do research.
And if you know anything about Stanley Kubrick, you know that the man LOVED his research. “Meticulous” doesn’t begin to describe how deep Kubrick dove.
So what did he come to realize as he examined every possible nook and cranny of nuclear war that didn’t require him to have Joint Chiefs-level security clearance?
The safety measures in place to ensure that the U.S. and Soviet Union didn’t destroy the entire world were absurdly insufficient. All it would take was one insane general to start a chain of events that could, in short order, render mankind extinct.
And Kubrick could not help but laugh at the horror of it all.
The looming threat of nuclear annihilation wouldn’t have been news to audiences in 1964. But Kubrick found something especially absurd in the systems supposedly designed to prevent it. He grafted onto this too-plausible doomsday scenario a menagerie of now-iconic buffoons so that audiences, too, could see the humor in humanity’s impending demise.
His observations were astute: the entire system was (and probably still is) totally fucked, and luck has played a huge role in us not, as of this writing at least, having killed ourselves.
Kubrick, in other words, did not simply have a target for his satire — he had an insight for it as well.
But neither Digger nor Don’t Look Up have any insight.
They only have observations: that narcissistic billionaires and power-hungry politicians are responsible for climate change, and that we’re all kinda screwed. They parade out thinly veiled caricatures of the people who have led us to the precipice of doom and say, “Look, don’t you recognize what assholes these people are?”
Which. Y’know.
We do.
It’s barely enough material for an SNL sketch, let alone a feature-length film.
Comedy depends on the element of surprise… and like Don’t Look Up, Digger has nothing surprising to say.
Well…
Okay.
Maybe one thing.
PART II: THEMES MOST UNDIGGABLE (YES, SPOILERS)
Digger is about Curtis Markson (Tom Cruise), an actor playing the billionaire oil tycoon Digger Rockwell in a Broadway revival of a play called Fossil Fools.
In the reality of the film, Digger Rockwell was a real person, and Fossil Fools is loosely inspired by the true story of how he more or less ruined the planet. At the conclusion of the play, audiences put on gas masks before venturing out into a mostly submerged New York City.
With the opening night of Fossil Fools mere hours away, Curtis has two problems.
First, his daughter was on a plane en route to her father’s big night, and now her plane has gone missing in the middle of a huge storm.
Second, he hates the myriad historical inaccuracies and straight-up liberties the play’s author takes with the truth.
It’s not entirely clear if his objections are based on the idea that a man responsible for genocide should not be joked about (he refers to Digger as a “composed, frightening, seductive psychopath”) or based on the idea that it dehumanizes the subject (he calls the Fossil Fools version of Digger a “cartoon” designed to “make some statement”) or both.
But the play’s director, Hannah (Talk to Me’s Sophie Wilde), pushes back, ostensibly arguing that turning Digger into a clown is cathartic: she, like most people, lost loved ones in the disaster, and making a mockery of Digger is the best way to process that trauma.
(Why is Curtis just now bringing this up, mere hours before Fossil Fools’ opening night? Are previews no longer a thing in this future? Don’t worry about it.)
Digger being both a play-within-a-movie and a movie about people putting on a play allows Iñárritu to get very meta with things. Which is how he’s able to stop the movie near the end and have one character come out and say, more or less, “Yeah, this all kinda sucks, but it doesn’t matter.”
That character is the play’s producer, Kenny (Jesse Plemons, handily stealing the movie in just a few short scenes). Kenny, we now learn, is the nephew of the real-life Digger Rockwell, and he acknowledges the validity of both Curtis’ and Hannah’s arguments:
“It really doesn’t matter. Satire, comedy, farce, drama — it doesn’t matter. You’re both right.”
The movie then goes on to show us the conclusion of Fossil Fools, which portrays Digger’s suicide. The audience reacts to Digger jumping off the side of a freighter and into the ocean by leaping to its feet and exploding into rapturous applause; some of them even weep.
Curtis subsequently joins his fellow cast members for a raucous backstage celebration.
…and, oh yeah, because Kenny’s family still has money, he’s able to find Curtis’ daughter and return her to her parents safe and sound.
So… what’s the point of the story?
Is it that even “monsters” like Digger Rockwell deserve their humanity?
That even subpar satire has a noble purpose?
That it’s okay to enjoy the suffering of bad people?
That even after the 1% ruin the world, we will be dependent upon the 1%?
All of the above?
What is Iñárritu trying to communicate here?
No, I’m seriously asking.
As Curtis puts it…
“What the fuck is happening? What are we DOING?”
Iñárritu more or less answered my question when he was asked about the twist during a recent interview:
“Telling the story this way was necessary because our reality is so complex now, and it’s so fast. Truth gets lost in this fictional version of the world we are all living in now. We are so close to it and so involved in it that talking about something like this is almost impossible in realistic terms, because there’s not one way to do it, or one truth… This film is about storytelling.”
Okay. So, insofar as Iñárritu is concerned, “this film is about storytelling” — or, perhaps more specifically, the inadequacy of storytelling to fully encompass the complex reality of any given person or situation.
Well, that’s pretty interesting.
I’m just not convinced the best way to convey that idea was by making the protagonist an actor and not, say, the “real” Digger Rockwell.
Truly, if the idea is to contrast Digger Rockwell the Man with Digger Rockwell the Character, then mightn’t it be useful to, I dunno, actually show us Digger Rockwell the Man, rather than just have an actor tell us about Digger Rockwell the Man?
Why is the onscreen contrast not between the two Diggers?
Curtis insists that Fossil Fools has reduced a complicated historical figure to a cartoon. Hannah argues that the cartoon serves a legitimate purpose. Kenny says they’re both right.
But how are we supposed to evaluate any of those positions when we’ve never met the actual Digger Rockwell?
We don’t know what Fossil Fools has distorted or omitted. We only know that Curtis believes it has distorted or omitted… uh… something.
The movie asks us to contemplate the distance between reality and representation without ever allowing us to see the reality.
What did Iñárritu and his FOUR CO-WRITERS (!!!) think was so interesting about Curtis Markson that they made him the protagonist?
And is it truly necessary to make the audience sit through a bad farce while trying to make the point that a bad farce is somehow actually pretty great?
I think Iñárritu may have fallen into the trap of finding show business inherently virtuous just because he happens to be in show business. In that same interview, he continues:
“Suddenly, I realized that I was asking myself how to talk about this, at what angle, in which tone. It was a need to find a way to separate me, and, actually, the same protagonist asking themselves: Which story are we telling ourselves? Which story would we like to tell?”
Ah.
So Curtis Markson is the protagonist because Iñárritu needed a surrogate for himself in the movie.
Perhaps Iñárritu isn’t primarily interested in the distance between Digger Rockwell and Fossil Fools. He’s interested in the people trying to bridge that distance.
Okay.
But in that case… Curtis needs an arc.
The titular protagonist of Preston Sturges’ 1941 classic Sullivan’s Travels is a director of hit comedies (Joel McCrea) who wants to make a drama because he thinks there’s no profundity in getting yuks.
But through a complicated series of events, Sullivan finds himself watching a group of prisoners laughing uproariously at a silly cartoon. Seeing how much joy these men with such hard lives take from something he might previously have dismissed as trivial, Sullivan comes to appreciate the value of comedy.
That’s Sullivan’s arc.
Curtis, on the other hand, gets something that looks like an arc.
He begins the film objecting to Fossil Fools‘ treatment of Digger Rockwell. By the end, he’s enthusiastically celebrating the production’s success with his fellow actors.
So what changed?
The most obvious answer is that Curtis has witnessed the audience’s reaction to the play. Hannah argued that ridiculing Digger would be cathartic for his victims, and the standing ovation would seem to vindicate her.
But here’s the thing: the audience’s catharsis doesn’t invalidate Curtis’ objections.
Fossil Fools can be emotionally satisfying and historically dishonest. Turning Digger into a buffoon might make his victims feel better while simultaneously obscuring something important about the man who destroyed their world.
Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Kenny even says so.
Does Curtis now believe that historical accuracy is less important than emotional truth? Does he accept that no single representation of Digger can possibly encompass the man? Does he simply enjoy the applause?
I don’t know.
And what the fuck does his missing daughter have to do with any of this?
Her disappearance gives Curtis something personal to worry about, sure. Perhaps his terror at the possibility of losing her is meant to help him understand Hannah’s grief. Perhaps Kenny’s ability to rescue her is meant to remind us that the wealthy remain powerful even after they’ve destroyed civilization.
But the movie doesn’t seem particularly interested in exploring either possibility.
Instead, Kenny effectively resolves both of Curtis’ problems. He tells him that neither he nor Hannah is wrong, and then he uses his family’s fortune to bring Curtis’ daughter home.
Curtis gets a happy ending, but I’m not convinced he earns it — or that his personal crisis has meaningfully changed his understanding of the artistic one.
Compare that to Sullivan’s Travels, where the protagonist’s experiences directly challenge his beliefs about the value of his work.
Sturges dramatizes a change in perspective. Iñárritu seems content to announce that multiple perspectives are valid.
And that’s frustrating, because the movie keeps stumbling upon genuinely fascinating contradictions without doing much with them.
Is it more important for art to be truthful or cathartic? Can satire illuminate the powerful, or does reducing them to buffoons prevent us from understanding how they became powerful in the first place? Does portraying a monster as a human being necessarily mean sympathizing with him?
Those are all questions worth asking.
But simply asking a complicated question isn’t the same thing as exploring it.
I’m all for ambiguity in storytelling, but ambiguity and a lack of focus aren’t necessarily the same thing.
And I can’t shake the feeling that Iñárritu has confused one for the other.
PART III: BUT STILL…
This essay was originally much longer and messier than the version you’re reading now.
But then I realized that I was guilty of doing exactly what I’ve accused Iñárritu of doing: failing to pick a goddamn lane.
I kept getting distracted by questions about Digger’s humanity, Curtis’ artistic integrity, Hannah’s grief, Kenny’s money, the missing daughter, and the audience’s ecstatic response to a fictional suicide.
Every time I thought I’d figured out what the movie was trying to say, some other detail would come along and complicate my interpretation.
Which is pretty funny, when you think about it.
Digger is, at least in part, about the impossibility of making sense of things through storytelling… and here I am, having spent days trying to make sense of its story.
Maybe Iñárritu intended all of this. Maybe the movie’s refusal to provide a satisfying answer is itself the answer.
Or maybe he and his co-writers simply bit off more than they could chew.
I honestly don’t know.
But I keep coming back to something that separates Digger from Don’t Look Up.
Adam McKay made a movie that knew exactly what it wanted to say, said it very loudly, and then ended.
Iñárritu made a movie that seems to be arguing with itself.
And as frustrating as that can be, I find it infinitely more interesting.
The trouble with Digger isn’t that it has nothing on its mind. It’s that it has so much on its mind that it can’t seem to decide what to do with any of it.
Which may explain why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the goddamn thing.
I’m not sure whether Digger is a brilliant movie that deliberately refuses to resolve its own contradictions, or a terrible movie that accidentally creates fascinating ones.
I’m not even sure the distinction matters as much to me as it probably should.
All I know is that I’ve spent more time thinking about this movie than almost anything else I’ve seen this year.
And for a movie I’m not even sure I like, that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.