I’ve spent the past few weeks digging.
Into box-office reports, reviews, interviews, social media feuds and fan forums packed with people arguing passionately about a movie that many of them haven’t actually seen. Somewhere along the way, after sifting through decades of Tom Cruise’s career and the strange journey that brought this film to life, I found an image I can’t get out of my head.
It isn’t the disappointing box-office numbers. It isn’t the critical divide.
It’s Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, sitting in an outrageously opulent bedroom, padded with a prosthetic belly, gray hair brushed into place, speaking in a Texas drawl while gently stroking a dying cat as the world outside collapses.
I’ve watched Cruise cling to airplanes, race motorcycles off cliffs and save humanity more times than I can count. I’ve never seen him like this.
Not because the makeup makes him unrecognizable. Plenty of actors disappear into prosthetics. What surprised me was his willingness to surrender the mythology that surrounds him. Here, he allows himself to look ridiculous, bloated, aging and weak. He lets Alejandro González Iñárritu explore what power looks like after the illusion has worn off.
That willingness is what makes the performance fascinating.
Digger is a man who drills into the earth for a living. He tears through the surface, extracts what lies beneath and turns it into profit. The name feels less like a character’s name than a statement of purpose.
In a strange way, the film operates exactly the same way.
It digs.
Into power. Into environmental politics. Into corporate storytelling. Into the narratives people build to justify their own behavior.
And perhaps most interestingly, into the stories we tell ourselves.
After Bardo, Iñárritu spent nearly a decade trying to bring this project to the screen. The film reportedly stalled multiple times before finally moving forward. Its origins trace back to climate concerns raised by Mexican playwright Sabina Berman, who co-wrote the screenplay, but the finished product is far stranger than a conventional environmental drama.
The real surprise is that Warner Bros. agreed to finance it.
Studios don’t usually spend between $160 million and $180 million on something this personal, this eccentric or this difficult to categorize. Yet that’s exactly what happened.
The gamble, at least financially, failed.
The film opened to roughly $8 million domestically and about $20 million worldwide, making it Cruise’s weakest opening in nearly two decades and putting Warner on track for substantial losses. The headlines practically wrote themselves.
But reducing Digger to a financial disappointment feels oddly narrow-minded.
If we evaluate every ambitious movie exclusively through its box-office performance, we’re accepting Hollywood’s preferred definition of success. The problem is that box-office numbers only tell us how many tickets were sold. They tell us very little about artistic risk, cultural impact or whether a filmmaker attempted something genuinely original.
Cruise’s career has long revolved around that tension.
Yes, he’s one of the most successful movie stars in history, but he’s also spent decades seeking out directors with strong personal visions. Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson all appear on his résumé. Whenever he drifts away from franchise filmmaking, there seems to be a conscious attempt to challenge the image audiences have of him.
Seen through that lens, Digger doesn’t feel like an anomaly.
It feels like the logical destination.
Before signing on, Cruise reportedly asked Iñárritu to read the screenplay aloud from beginning to end. That’s not the behavior of someone chasing an easy hit. It’s the behavior of an actor who heard something in the material that spoke to him.
Whether audiences embraced that decision is another question entirely.
Few films this year have generated such sharply divided reactions. Critics from The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian and Variety were deeply skeptical, while filmmakers including Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón publicly celebrated the film.
The marketing campaign leaned directly into that divide.
Instead of hiding mixed reviews, Warner turned them into part of the pitch. The message was simple: Decide for Yourself.
The strategy worked because the disagreement itself became part of the conversation.
What’s fascinating is that the split doesn’t really seem to revolve around craftsmanship. Most viewers agree that the film looks extraordinary and that Cruise delivers one of the boldest performances of his career.
The real divide is about expectation.
People who arrived expecting a Tom Cruise blockbuster found a grotesque billionaire helping steer the world toward disaster. Viewers expecting another Birdman encountered a sprawling, self-aware satire that frequently mocks its own seriousness.
Neither audience got exactly what it expected.
That may explain why reactions have been so extreme.
Iñárritu has said he’d rather provoke a polarized response than a lukewarm one. Watching the discourse surrounding Digger, it’s hard to argue with him. Whatever else the film accomplishes, indifference is not one of its outcomes.
What often gets lost, however, is what the movie is actually about.
Despite all the headlines about climate change, I don’t think Digger is primarily an environmental film.
It’s a film about storytelling.
More specifically, it’s about how powerful people use storytelling to avoid accountability.
The environmental catastrophe at the center of the plot matters less than the scramble to control public perception afterward. Digger understands this instinctively. So do politicians, corporate executives and media figures throughout the film. Everyone is fighting for ownership of the narrative because everyone understands that control of the story often determines how reality itself is perceived.
The irony is that real-world events ended up echoing the screenplay.
Ideas involving resource extraction in Greenland were imagined years before they entered mainstream political debate. By the time cameras rolled, reality had begun catching up with fiction.
The movie did not predict the future.
The future simply wandered into the movie’s frame.
That strange overlap strengthens one of the film’s central themes: stories don’t merely describe reality. Sometimes they shape how reality is understood.
It’s worth remembering that the screenplay originally carried the working title Blah, Blah, Blah.
At first, that sounds like a joke.
By the end, it sounds like a warning.
Language can illuminate reality. It can also bury it under endless layers of spin, branding and self-deception.
Recent cinema offers an interesting comparison.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis became a high-profile example of a visionary director spending enormous resources on a deeply personal project that struggled to connect with audiences. Digger now finds itself facing a similar question.
What happens when celebrated filmmakers pursue ambitious ideas that audiences simply aren’t interested in buying?
Maybe the answer says more about the state of contemporary moviegoing than it does about either film.
There appears to be a widening gap between the kinds of films major directors want to make and the kinds of films audiences actually support financially.
As Iñárritu put it: “This isn’t ice cream.”
He’s right.
Digger isn’t designed for comfort. It isn’t designed for universal approval. And it certainly isn’t designed to function as straightforward entertainment.
It asks something from the audience.
Whether viewers find that demand rewarding or exhausting will depend entirely on their tolerance for excess.
Seen within the larger arc of Iñárritu’s career, the film feels like a continuation of the inward turn that began with Bardo. Earlier works such as Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel looked outward, examining interconnected lives and social systems. Bardo was about self-examination. Digger pushes even deeper into that territory.
Both films feel less interested in explaining the world than in questioning the assumptions of the people observing it.
That doesn’t make them failures.
It does make them difficult.
Having seen the film, I have no interest in joining either side of the debate. I don’t want to dismiss it as an overindulgent catastrophe, nor do I feel compelled to crown it a misunderstood masterpiece.
What I saw was a deliberately uncomfortable movie.
Some scenes are brilliant. Others test the audience’s patience. At times it’s funny. At times it’s infuriating. Occasionally it’s both at once.
The instability isn’t a flaw.
It’s the design.
Cruise disappears beneath layers of makeup and prosthetics, while Emmanuel Lubezki photographs power and excess with near-religious grandeur. The result is a film that frequently overwhelms itself, but never accidentally.
Even its excess feels intentional.
And that’s what ultimately makes Digger interesting.
The film succeeds at proving its own argument.
Instead of debating the environmental, political and cultural anxieties it depicts, audiences spend their time debating the movie itself. The spectacle becomes the distraction.
The discourse becomes the story.
And in that sense, the film’s thesis is playing out in real time.
One line lingers long after the credits roll:
“This is a disaster movie, but the disaster is us.”
By the final act, I found myself returning to that image of Digger sitting in his ornate bedroom with a dying cat in his lap while the world burns outside. The camera pulls back. The audience applauds. The lights come up.
Outside the theater, nothing has changed.
Yet somehow the image no longer belongs solely to Digger.
It belongs to us.
To the people defending the movie.
To the people attacking it.
To everyone treating culture as another battleground in the endless fight over meaning.
At a certain point, the hole becomes so deep that you stop wondering whether you’re excavating the film or excavating yourself.
Because the movie, the criticism, the box office, the memes and even this review are ultimately participating in the same conversation.
They’re all arguments about who gets to shape the narrative.
And narratives, for better or worse, are something we build together.
Film details
Digger (U.S., 2026)
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Running Time: 128 minutes
Cast: Tom Cruise, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Music: Cosmo Sheldrake
Studio: Warner Bros.
If you liked…
Birdman, Bardo, Dr. Strangelove, Brazil, There Will Be Blood and Megalopolis.
And here’s an experiment: watch Birdman again after Digger.
The conversation between those two films is more revealing than either one on its own.
Recommendation: Anyone allergic to theater, satire, ambiguity or movies that actively enjoy provoking arguments should probably sit this one out.
