REVIEW

‘DIGGER’ Is Climate Cynicism Masquerading as Satire

By Matt Oakes · September 29, 2026

Cynical and exhausting, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s climate-disaster satire Digger is a menagerie of broad swings and character pantomimes posing as intelligent, pressing parody. Slathered in self-importance, it desperately wants to be a modern Dr. Strangelove filtered through contemporary anxieties about rampant capitalism, climate change, and the powerful old men steering humanity toward inevitable disaster for a quick buck. Tom Cruise plays the title role, an oil baron billionaire cozied up to the most powerful people on the planet, including an ailing American president played by John Goodman. And while it’s interesting to see Cruise flex into a dramatic role that requires physical transformation and moves him away from his action bona fides, the effort just doesn’t pay off here.

The film centers Digger Rockwell, a wealthy oil baron from a long line of wealthy oil barons who, after ignoring the advice of his hired scientists, “inadvertently” causes a climate disaster with vast global ramifications. Trusted by the president to right this wrong, Digger instead uses his immense political power and wealth to shape the catastrophe into a profit-taking exercise, evangelizing about humanity’s dependence upon oil even in the face of its most destructive consequences. Rather than go on an apology tour, he aims to convince an angry public that they need him now more than ever. Outrage ensues.

In an age where tech tycoons like Peter Thiel struggle to convincingly even say that they want the human race to survive, satire about greedy old men running us headlong into disaster just isn’t all that funny anymore. Reality has already become too absurd. Digger needs to somehow exaggerate a world in which billionaires speak about humanity with a kind of detachment one has when considering to pick up a dime, and the caricatures here rarely outpace reality.

The marketing for Iñárritu’s latest has been intentional about obfuscating a major conceit revealed about 30 minutes in – and our press screening began with a plea not to spoil it – so I’ll attempt to navigate around this major factor in somewhat vague terms. But imagine the entire narrative is built on a metatextual element, a play-within-a-play type of conceit ostensibly meant to deepen the themes about rampant capitalism and powerful men who chase quarterly profit over humanity. In practice, it adds another layer of pretense and more padding to the already long runtime without making the satire any sharper, and it kneecaps two of the movie’s greatest assets.

Iñárritu reunites with Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, but both men seem to be missing their curveball. Iñárritu because his comic sensibilities are more muted than he gives himself credit for, Lubezki because the restrictions imposed by the conceit prevent him from really flexing. It’s a strange thing to reunite two accomplished technicians capable of something as formally audacious as Birdman or as visually majestic as The Revenant, then build a movie that actively suppresses what both do best.

More frustrating is the screenplay – co-written by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman – which attempts to make everyone shoulder responsibility for our dependence on oil through modern conveniences like next-day delivery or driving to the grocery store to pay $7.99 a pound for chicken thighs. Digger is supply-and-demand economics in schlubby human form, an easy mark to blame rather than confronting the consumption habits of the masses. There’s an argument there, but making the whole world complicit in its own downfall feels almost exculpatory.

Obviously modern consumers participate in a system built on convenience and rampant consumption. But there’s an enormous gulf between ordering something from Amazon Prime and being one of the handful of people powerful enough to knowingly prioritize billions in quarterly profits over humanity’s future. We are, at this very moment, watching a billionaire who has bankrupted a half-dozen companies apply the same method to a country, conning it and enriching himself as he goes. That is not a supply-and-demand problem. Flattening the distinction doesn’t make the satire more complicated so much as it lets those most deserving its barbs off the hook.

Cruise is certainly in a different mode here. For one, he’s doing much less running than we’re accustomed to. The transformation required many hours in the makeup chair, accompanied by a wispy Southern accent, and there’s something about Cruise playing this kind of larger-than-life caricature that fits his signature bravado and stage presence. But Digger himself is stubbornly one-dimensional. The concealed conceit lets Cruise tuck into another layer of the performance – and it’s there he’s at his best – though that layer ultimately adds very little to the overall experience.

As a directorial effort, the whole thing feels aggressively slapstick. A Mel Brooks movie without the well-meaning vaudeville zaniness. A Ray Cooney stage farce lacking clever joke stacking. A detailed Wes Anderson production with no warmth or charm. There’s just never enough laughs to justify the excess. Iñárritu wants to have his cake and eat it too, going for broad comedy while also overreaching for a heavy dramatic throughline about humanity’s ability to deceive itself into placidity while the planet pummels its way toward destruction.

Those two things can coexist, but here the over-the-top elements aren’t either funny or insightful enough to make the combination work even remotely. Instead, the experience is mostly just grating. Goodman is dialed up to 11 basically all the time, and there’s little subtlety to any of the performances – which makes it a good representation of the project at large. Riz Ahmed is perhaps the sole exception, playing a morally upstanding scientist with a level of restraint the movie around him never matches.

There are big ideas rattling around inside Digger: moral culpability, mass-scale self-deception, capitalism’s capacity to absorb existential threats and turn them into quarterly projections, the convenient distance between the things we consume and the damage ultimately required to deliver them. But the movie shouts those ideas through layers of farce and metatextual trickery until there’s almost nothing left to chew on.

Its cynicism is exhausting, its comedy rarely funny enough to compensate, and the elaborate conceit only makes a simple argument feel more self-absorbed and tacky. For a movie about humanity refusing to recognize the disaster directly in front of it, Digger spends an awful lot of time glazing its own reflection.

CONCLUSION: Iñárritu’s dark climate satire admittedly takes big swings, offering a new thespian mode for superstar Tom Cruise, but with a dearth of insightful parables and actual laugh lines, its lengthy runtime drags. The sad truth is that reality regularly outpaces satire in end-stage technocratic capitalism, and the cynicism just isn’t all that funny.