Digger Review: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Satire Is Stale But Never Boring

Many were optimistic that the first Trump Presidential term would be, at the very least, a blessing for satire. Two years into his second term and a former member of his cabinet was the one to declare comedy “legal” again, and the most lightweight of comedians were forced off the air in attempts by the networks to ally themselves with his administration further. This is the cultural context that kept circling around my mind while watching Digger, a movie that raises questions about whether the troubles of our times will be processed by future generations through art, and what that can possibly look like, considering the billionaires holding the purse strings. Unfortunately, it doesn’t satisfyingly explore these ideas so much as raise them so the audience can have a more invigorating post-viewing conversation; David Ellison may not be in control of Warner Bros. just yet, but even he would shrug off this satire aimed at the right-wing ruling class if he were in charge when the project arrived at his desk.

The specifics of how the movie approaches these ideas is being treated as a spoiler, which director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has explicitly asked critics not to reveal in all invitations sent to the press—maybe the first case of a director willing an F Cinemascore upon himself. Personally speaking, I found this unrevealed aspect of the movie far less interesting than the face-value shenanigans teased in the trailer, its bolder background conceit never living up to the audacious satirical ideas presented on paper. The film instead resembles something closer to a post-apocalyptic Birdman. There’s a significant change in context to that movie, but it feels like the director treading familiar ground. When the movie isn’t operating in that more thoughtful register, it’s content to mimic Dr. Strangelove, albeit with a broadness of tone that makes Peter Sellers’ German scientist uncontrollably giving the Nazi salute look subtle.

Luckily, Iñárritu has a go-for-broke lead performance from Tom Cruise–and an arguably better supporting turn from Riz Ahmed–to ground the stupidity. As someone allergic to the over-the-top comic stylings of his Tropic Thunder performance, I was pleasantly surprised that his Digger Rockwell was closer in spirit to the tragic egotism of Magnolia’s Frank T.J. Mackey, complete with a show-stopping monologue where he paints himself a savior from the ills of the world to which he’s contributing. Those ills are the ecological fallout from decades of his company’s oil-drilling in Greenland, with an ice shelf 400-feet high and approximately the size of Washington D.C. (lovingly nicknamed Judy) heading towards mainland Europe. 

His scientist Ganesh (Ahmed) has long warned about the impact, which could trigger a tsunami that would kill hundreds of thousands and displace even more as the continent continues to flood. The President (John Goodman) is uninterested in acting based on Ganesh’s various projections that rely on the whims of wind and ocean currents, and his administration instead opts to use an AI to ban contentious words ranging from “ice” to “Al Gore” on social media. It was either that or drop a nuke on the iceberg.

The beat-by-beat fallout, which builds up to Digger’s impassioned speech to the booing members of the European parliament about how his company supplies their “freedom” (itself an unintentional echo of the far better Foghorn Leghorn courtroom monologue in last month’s Coyote vs. Acme), may be predictable for anybody with an interest in more realist post-apocalyptic dramas such as Threads, but it’s never boring. Cruise and Ahmed both locate the right tone for the director’s brand of over-the-top dark comedy, finding just the ideal amount of silliness in the seriousness, working best when bouncing off each other. The same can’t be said of the rest of the supporting ensemble, especially a well-cast but badly-utilized Goodman, who has been cursed with a character written as if all his uses of curse words were the jokes in and of themselves. The movie threatens to become a tiresome edgelord shock fest each time he reminds someone he has “cancer of the asshole.” 

For reasons I can’t get into, Digger insulates itself from the criticism of being unsatisfyingly broad satire, to the extent this is even called out within the text. But satire doesn’t need to be dry and hyper-specific to be funny; Dr. Strangelove and the delightfully lowbrow works of Mel Brooks are considered among the greatest comedies Hollywood has ever produced, showing that you can take real cultural anxieties and lingering historical trauma as the starting point for a good joke. The difference is: they were first to the punch when it came to tackling everything from nuclear fallout to the holocaust, setting the tone for how comedy would be able to approach the traumatic; Digger isn’t even the first star-studded climate-change comedy this decade (although it’s a major improvement over the hectoring condescension of Don’t Look Up). There’s funny material and precision-focused comic performances in the mix here, but they’re contained within a movie already resigned to not having anything new to poke fun at.

If you found yourself put off by the constant drumming in Birdman, rest assured that Iñárritu has managed to make Digger just as stylistically off-putting. Cosmo Sheldrake’s score oscillates between whimsical and Hans Zimmer-style booms of orchestral sound, while each set is drowned of color, Cruise’s pale make-up occasionally making him blend into the walls of his palatial mansion. As handled by returning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, the bold decision to capture this desaturated palette in gorgeous VistaVision turns out to be a big swing that pays off. If only that were true of more in Digger, a movie where the admirable satirical boldness appears further devoid of insight the more removed one gets.

Digger opens in theaters on Friday, October 2.