Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed bring it. The movie around them is still figuring itself out.
Digger is a huge swing for Alejandro G. Iñárritu. That alone makes it interesting. This is not a filmmaker playing things safe, and I respect any movie that is willing to be this strange, this ambitious, and this difficult to fully pin down.
I just wish it connected more.
The film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to prove he can save the world from a disaster he helped create. That premise alone gives the movie plenty to work with. It is a climate satire, a billionaire takedown, a political farce, a corporate guilt trip, and a meta commentary on power, ego, image, and accountability. At times, it feels like Dr. Strangelove filtered through Iñárritu’s most theatrical instincts.
That is both the appeal and the problem. Digger has a lot on its mind, and it wants you to feel all of it at once.
A Movie With a Lot on Its Mind
Cruise’s Digger Rockwell is not just a powerful man trying to fix a crisis. He is the crisis. His empire, his ego, and his refusal to accept responsibility have helped create a global disaster, and the film watches as he tries to spin that catastrophe into one more opportunity to control the narrative.
That is where Digger is at its sharpest. It is about the kind of person who can break the world and still believe he should be the one trusted to save it. There is a brutal honesty in that idea, especially in a moment where billionaires, corporations, and governments are constantly trying to rebrand damage as innovation.
The movie is satire, but it is also meta. Then it gets meta inside of that. Fans of Birdman will recognize the layers, the theatricality, and the feeling that the film is constantly stepping outside itself to comment on what it is doing. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it feels like the movie is more interested in its own cleverness than in the people at the center of the story.
Honestly, I would not know where to start if someone asked me to explain the plot cleanly. I do not mean that as a full complaint. The confusion feels intentional. Iñárritu wants the audience off balance. He wants the movie to feel like a world spinning through crisis, denial, performance, and panic. But there were moments where the ambition got ahead of the story.
The big twist definitely made me think. It also left me feeling a little tricked, and I am still deciding how I feel about that.
Tom Cruise Is the Reason to Watch
This is where Digger shines.
Tom Cruise gives a performance built for awards season. It is big, committed, strange, vain, desperate, and unlike anything we have seen from him in a long time. He is not playing the clean heroic problem solver here. He is playing a man whose confidence has curdled into delusion.
What makes the performance work is how far Cruise is willing to push it. Digger Rockwell is ridiculous, but Cruise never treats him like a joke. He plays the character as someone who truly believes he is the smartest man in the room, even when the room is collapsing around him. That mix of arrogance and panic gives the performance its charge.
I think Cruise gets the Oscar nomination for this, and I think he deserves it. Even when the movie frustrated me, I never stopped watching him. He gives the film the kind of energy that makes every scene feel like it could either explode or completely fall apart.
Riz Ahmed Stands Toe to Toe With Him
As strong as Cruise is, Riz Ahmed might be the real standout. He plays Ganesh, a scientist working for the President, and he brings a much needed sense of focus to the film’s chaos. In a movie filled with ego, noise, and performance, Ahmed gives the story a sharper moral center.
He stands toe to toe with Cruise without blinking. That is not easy in a film built so heavily around a massive Tom Cruise performance, but Ahmed never gets swallowed by it. His presence is calmer, more precise, and often more emotionally grounded. He gives the audience something to hold onto when the movie starts spinning into its stranger layers.
It has been a joy watching his career grow, and this may be some of his best work yet.
John Goodman also gives the film a strong jolt whenever he appears. As President Compson, he brings booming authority and comic exhaustion to the political side of the story. His scenes with Cruise have the kind of closed room tension the movie could have used even more of. When the film leans into those power dynamics, it finds a sharper rhythm.
A Real Treat to Look At
Even when Digger lost me narratively, it never lost me visually. Emmanuel Lubezki shot the film on VistaVision, and every frame looks carefully designed. This is a gorgeous movie, full of rich texture, theatrical framing, and images that feel too strange and polished to be accidental.
The cinematography gives the film a massive, almost artificial beauty. That fits the story because so much of Digger is about performance. Rooms do not just feel like rooms. They feel like stages. Political spaces, luxury spaces, corporate spaces, and crisis rooms all feel like places where people are acting out versions of power.
The highlight for me is a single unbroken shot of Cruise delivering a monologue. No cuts. No escape. Just Cruise, the camera, and the pressure of the moment. As someone who works in video, I could have watched that scene on a loop. It is the kind of sequence that reminds you how powerful a camera can be when the actor and the framing are completely locked in.
Where It Lost Me
What I missed most was heart.
Digger has ideas. It has performances. It has visual style. It has ambition. What it does not always have is a reason to care about these people beyond what they represent. The characters often feel like symbols inside a larger argument, and while that can work in satire, it also creates distance.
I wanted more of an emotional anchor. I wanted something to make the catastrophe feel heavier beyond the intellectual understanding of what was at stake. The film is clearly angry and cynical, but that cynicism sometimes keeps the audience at arm’s length.
There is also a subplot that pulls focus from the main story when the film could have used that time to breathe. The movie is already juggling satire, climate panic, political absurdity, corporate guilt, and meta storytelling. Adding another thread makes the structure feel even more crowded.
That does not make Digger bad. It makes it frustrating. There is a great movie somewhere inside this one, and pieces of it are absolutely thrilling. But as a whole, it feels like a film fighting itself.
The Verdict
Digger is gorgeous, well acted, and full of things to say. It is also messy, emotionally distant, and sometimes more fascinating than satisfying.
Tom Cruise gives one of the best performances of his career, and Riz Ahmed nearly walks away with the movie. The cinematography is stunning, the ambition is undeniable, and Iñárritu deserves credit for making something this strange at this scale.
But I cannot say it fully worked for me. The film has the shape of a major cinematic event, but the emotional connection never quite caught up to the craft.
Go for the performances. Stay for the one shot. Bring a friend to explain the plot on the way home.
Tom Cruise gives one of his best performances in #Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s bold and messy climate satire. Riz Ahmed nearly steals the film, Emmanuel Lubezki’s visuals are stunning, but the movie’s ideas hit harder than its emotions.
