Let’s Dig In to Digger

Spoilers — a lot of them! — follow for Digger, released in theaters on October 2. 

The secrecy around Digger has led to a number of wild theories about what Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise are up to in the former’s first movie since 2022’s Bardo and the latter’s first non-franchise movie since 2017’s American Made. Is the movie about Cruise’s buried-under-prosthetics oilman Digger secretly a musical? Is it a meta-textual celebration of Cruise à la Jay Kelly’s treatment of George Clooney? The film’s plot has been kept under wraps, and, well, once you see Digger, you’ll understand why. The movie is a Russian nesting doll of plot twists and framing devices, one that evokes Iñárritu’s Birdman, mimics Dr. Strangelove, and ends up in a sci-fi dystopia. How does Digger get there? What’s Iñárritu trying to say? And, most important, does it work? Let’s dig in.

Wait, this whole thing is a play?

Digger begins in a mansion decorated in typical asshole-landman chic — antlers and stuffed animals everywhere — while the head of Rockwell Oil takes a frantic call from an employee in Greenland. A methane leak from a pipeline (which Digger ignored) has caused an ice shelf five times the size of Washington, D.C., to detach, and currents and winds will soon cause it to collide with Europe. Digger meets with President Compson (John Goodman) and his Cabinet, none of whom take seriously the dire warnings of Digger’s top scientist, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed); instead of taking responsibility and warning European leaders that they’ll soon be facing a climate-caused genocide, they would rather blow up the glacier or ignore it altogether. Everyone here is acting over the top, chewing on dialogue and screaming at one another, until a quiet moment when Digger and Compson look out at a field behind Digger’s mansion — and a guy pops up out of the ground to replace a tree that fell over, and theater director Hannah (Sophie Wilde) calls for a break in rehearsal.

None of this is Digger’s actual life. The whole thing is revealed to be a staging of an elaborate, multi-set play called Fossil Fools, a satire that’s mocking Digger, Compson, and other American business and government figures. All of that stuff seemingly did happen in the real world of the movie; the ice shelf destroyed Europe and a second gigantic mass of ice unleashed nuclear waste on the Alaska coast. For decades now, the play has been a cult favorite, but Cruise’s Curtis Markson — the actor playing Digger — is having a hard time with how goofily Fossil Fools is presenting these people. The film goes back and forth between the production of Fossil Fools and backstage chaos, poking at whether satire is actually a successful means of criticism. And one of the characters integral to the film’s curiosity about whether satire works is Kenny Rockwell, Digger’s nephew, played by Jesse Plemons.

What’s Kenny’s deal?

After Digger establishes Fossil Fools, Plemons’s Kenny shows up. He lurks backage, acts very chummy with Curtis, and describes himself as a “producer” who has “some money” in the play. Like so many recent Plemons characters, he just seems like an off-kilter weirdo — until the film’s final act reveals his last name. That’s Kenny Rockwell, and he runs a powerful “global intelligence firm” called Worldwide Security. Digger is his uncle (Kenny is depicted as a redheaded kid in the play, hanging around Digger’s mansion), and Kenny first saw Fossil Fools 15 years ago. As strangers laughed at his family, Kenny felt himself getting swept up in their anger and, eventually, their satisfaction at how the play resolved. He became “part of the mob,” and he has used his wealth to purchase the play’s rights, hire Hannah and Curtis (whom he specifically hunted down because of how much Curtis reminded him of his uncle), and build out this crew of “fine artists.”

Plemons plays this big speech mostly sincerely, and everyone buys that he wants to stage Fossil Fools to “convince people to brave the street” and “get together again”; the cast and crew return to work once he encourages them to “finish the goddamn play.” At the end of the performance, we see the audience members in the packed theater explode into tears and jeers when Digger and the president die onstage. There’s an additional layer, though, to the line Kenny repeats when trying to appease Hannah and Digger as they bicker about the play: “It doesn’t matter.” In response to Curtis’s worry that the actors are all overdoing it and diminishing the seriousness of this crisis, Kenny emphasizes that the genre of Fossil Fools is irrelevant — “satire, farce, drama, tragedy, it doesn’t matter” — because people will enjoy it regardless since it ends with Digger’s downfall. But there’s a sinister edge to Kenny’s statement.

Sinister? Say more …

Kenny seems like an altruistic figure sympathetic to people’s dislike of his family and interested in helping others; he does Curtis a solid by tracking down his daughter, whose flight from Jamaica has gone missing after a storm over the island increased to a category-six hurricane. That little detail adds up with the film’s other hints (like sensors inside the theater space measuring the air quality outside) about how bad things have gotten. Answer: Really bad! After the audience eats up Fossil Fools, they strap on respirators and go outside, where the world is murky and apocalyptic. Drones hover in the air watching people, robot cops roam the streets, human soldiers in Humvees point their guns at civilians, and walls are decorated with graffiti slogans like “Compliance is freedom.”

In one interpretation, Kenny is actually a good guy trying to make a difference in a ruined world. But the character, and by extension the movie, is more compelling if we assume Kenny’s motives aren’t benign, which would align with Plemons’s tendency to play unexpected, unassuming villains. In this reading, Kenny sees Fossil Fools as a kind of controlled opposition, a play that funnels everyone’s anxieties and anger about how they live now toward a villain from the past. This is admittedly vibes-and-subtext based, but it feels probable that evil tech-bro Kenny is responsible for those drones and robots, and he’s using Digger as a shield for himself — for the riches that he still seemingly possesses and for his “global intelligence” company, which has so thoroughly surveilled the world that he can find someone in midair. By expanding his uncle’s legacy of tapping oil as a natural resource, Kenny has realized that people are a natural resource he can tap with Fossil Fools, mining all their outrage and giving them satisfaction that the play convinces them is good enough. If they’re happy with their circuses, maybe they won’t clamor for a freer society or an improved world.

Is Iñárritu serious?

Very serious! Look, your mileage will vary on how much patience you have for the film’s interrogation of the climate crisis, communicated mostly via big speeches. Ahmed’s Ganesh explains very clearly how much corporations, governments, and militaries are to blame, and Digger taunts a room of heckling European leaders about how little they’ve committed to enacting actual change. Reviews have called the film a lecture, but I found it far more tolerable than something like, say, Don’t Look Up, which to me had more contempt for the average people in its audience. Digger takes aim very squarely at Big Oil companies, the governments that enable them, and an entrenched world order that isn’t willing to make any sacrifices for its future. And I appreciate how Iñárritu, through Curtis’s frustration with Fossil Fools’s cartoonish presentation of its characters, seems to be warning us against just laughing at the people destroying the world. Mockery isn’t enough, and it’s actually dangerous to diminish these people as one-off aberrations and pretend they aren’t propped up by far-reaching apparatuses.

More than anything, it feels like Iñárritu is, through Fossil Fools and the funding it receives from Kenny, grappling with how compromised capitalism is these days by megacorporations and private equity. Is Digger criticizing people for getting joy out of entertainment that’s brought to them by, say, Mubi or A24, with their ties to venture capital involved with Israeli and American defense companies? I don’t think it’s a direct attack on the average cinephile, just as I don’t think Digger’s speeches are aimed solely at average people. Digger is trying to punch up rather than down and ask how we’re supposed to live with the fact that nearly all our industries — energy, military, entertainment, whatever — are in some way complicit in the destruction of the world. And from Iñárritu’s place within one of those industries, Digger is trying to figure out what an individual person can actually do. Does satire still have an impact? Can one movie make a difference? What good can art actually do right now, when we’re past the point of no return when it comes to climate change? If acting in Digger inspired Tom Cruise to, say, stop using private jets, that would be good, but … will it? Kenny may insist that “it doesn’t matter,” but it’s up to us to decide if Digger does.