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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Oliver Milman

Tom Cruise’s Digger is a commercial flop – but also the perfect climate film for our time

Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell raises both arms while speaking in a domed, crowded auditorium
Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell in a scene from Digger. Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures/Warner Bros Pictures/AP

Digger, the new Alejandro González Iñárritu film, is bombastic, misanthropic and an epic, critically savaged flop. It is also the near-perfect climate change film for our era.

Digger Rockwell, the eponymous protagonist played by Tom Cruise, is a bluntly caricatured Texas oilman blase about the environmental ruin of his drilling, even as it triggers a disastrous splitting of the Arctic ice sheet. This causes a vast iceberg, five times the size of Washington DC, to barrel towards Europe and threaten a devastating tsunami.

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