Imagine the most ridiculous uber-wealthy person alive. Maybe he’s a little rotund, his expensive silk pajamas barely hiding his protruding paunch. Maybe he wakes up in a mansion filled with gaudy antiques and monuments to his greatness, and is perpetually followed by a housemaid who silently shuffles behind him, cleaning up the mess that he carelessly leaves in his loud, obnoxious wake. Maybe his double chin wobbles in anger while he berates the staff of his oil rig for interrupting his daily calls with the most important people around the world — cracks in some iceberg be damned.
But in Digger, you don’t have to imagine, because Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon who becomes responsible for a climate disaster that could destroy the world, is the most odious, self-centered caricature of a wealthy gazillionaire possible. In fact, imagination is pretty much thrown out the window and left for dead in Alejandro Iñárritu’s apocalyptic black comedy — and I mean apocalyptic in both senses of the word. Digger, like the impending climate catastrophe it depicts, is also a bit of a disaster, though that’s part of the intention of the movie. It’s almost designed to be polarizing, Digger’s first half playing like an endurance test of how long you can listen to men yelling incessantly, while the second half lays out a winking metatextual explanation for why we watched men yell for an hour. It would be a clever, compelling rug-pull, if it all weren’t so smug.
