Maybe I’m amazed that Tom Cruise thought Digger was a good idea, let alone a potential Oscar winner. Cruise, 64, has never won a competitive Oscar, and despite being awarded an honorary statuette last year, he remains hungry. Shocker. But what on Earth were Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy thinking when they greenlit Digger? $180 million for an even more out-of-touch and smug version of 2021’s Don’t Look Up? Alejandro G. Iñárritu is somehow regarded as a significant auteur, despite having only directed seven features, only one of which (Birdman) was halfway decent. Warner Bros. threw another $100 million in the trash promoting this movie using Cruise and Iñárritu’s names in equal proportion—what were they thinking? Besides the fact that Iñárritu hasn’t directed a theatrically released feature in over a decade (2022’s Bardo was produced by Netflix and, like all other Netflix films, disappeared after some qualifying awards runs), the trailers for Digger were vague, gray, and loud—just like the movie! It bombed spectacularly over the weekend, making less than $10 million against a total negative cost of $280 million. Now, having seen the movie, how could anyone involved not see this coming?
Tom Cruise has had a few duds over the past 43 years, but none like Digger. People still make fun of Vanilla Sky, but Cameron Crowe’s own 2001 venture into pretension had its moments and looks like a masterpiece now; I doubt Digger will ever rise above “horseshit.” Never mind the absurdly dated politics and American stereotypes straight out of the Bush administration—Don’t Look Up wasn’t particularly good, but it wasn’t worthless or boring or premised on exhausted ideas and preconceptions. I’m down for a well-made liberal fantasy/nightmare about “the climate crisis,” I guess—although I’d much rather see a movie about the real crisis occurring right now in Europe. Does anyone in the world have the balls to make a movie out of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints?
The advertising for Digger has been so sparing because there’s a major twist that’s revealed half an hour in. Stop reading if you don’t want to know. Digger is not really about a Texas oil baron played by Tom Cruise. It’s about a theater company staging a revival of a play about the oil baron Digger Rockwell. Cruise, playing indistinguishable parts, bloviates and screams every line of the play during dress rehearsal as John Goodman (POTUS), Michael Stuhlbarg (VPOTUS), Riz Ahmed (scientist), and others satirize long-dead politicians who brought about the post-apocalyptic world that the theater audience now lives in. The play’s called Fossil Fools, and it’s being staged by Jesse Plemons, nephew of the real Digger. In between setups, Cruise rushes backstage to figure out if his daughter made it out of hurricane ravaged Jamaica. Plemons is a tech guru, and he finds Cruise’s daughter with ease, while reassuring the actor that Fossil Fools doesn’t make like of history, it allows the audience to process their trauma through satire.
Talk about on the nose… Cruise, playing Digger, jumps into the ocean, and the audience gives him a standing ovation. The house lights come on, and everyone starts putting on their custom oxygen masks (one brand is called “LUNGZ”) to brave the “Level 4” conditions outside. The final shot of Digger shows the audience walking out onto the sidewalks of a flooded Manhattan, a filthy Venice with homeless people and abandoned cars among the canals that used to be Broadway. The end credits roll over this shot, and everyone goes about their day, keeps calm and carries on, all under the watchful eye of military police, robots, and drones.
Digger is of a piece with last year’s One Battle After Another, widely acclaimed but another financial loss for Warner Bros. Paul Thomas Anderson botched Thomas Pynchon and refused to engage with contemporary America, combining disparate political groups and eras in a pathetic attempt to just “vibe it out” and hopefully land on a picture of where we are now. Nice try, dumbass. Digger is even worse, lacking any of Anderson’s aw-shucks humility and overflowing with “righteous anger” based on an apocalypse scenario that hasn’t held water for nearly a decade. Pandemics, race riots, a burning Europe—this is happening right now, and Hollywood still insists that global warming NO! climate change is going to kill us Again, this wouldn’t matter as much if the movie were, say, entertaining, but it’s a one-note mess with far more anger for its audience than any leaders in politics, business, or tech. Hollywood’s "blithe denial of the Bush administration" (as J. Hoberman once put it) has morphed into a dangerous projection during the Trump era, betraying a bloodthirsty resentment for all of humanity (as in last year’s Bugonia, similarly out-of-touch and smug but funny enough and nice-looking). And why? Because The New York Times has been telling them the world is on the brink ever since Trump ran for President?
Digger was the last film released by Warner Bros. Tomorrow, the company will merge with Paramount and become just one branch of a new corporation called Skydance. That’s all folks! De Luca and Abdy will land on their feet, but their largely unsuccessful auteur run was a far cry from the kinds of deals that destroyed New Hollywood in the early-1980s. Digger’s no Heaven’s Gate, and while it’ll certainly lose more money than Cimino’s infamous flop, there’s zero chance it’ll be restored and reevaluated in 25 years. It’s not as if Digger will stop anything particularly special, either—what exactly did De Luca and Abdy accomplish? They produced Digger, One Battle After Another, Joker 2, The Bride!, The End of Oak Street, and Sinners. Only Ryan Coogler’s film was a hit—not that it matters in the long run, because Coogler convinced De Luca and Abdy to revert the rights to Sinners to him after 25 years.
I’m not convinced that Skydance will make better movies than this last iteration of Warner Bros., but they won’t produce any more white elephants like Digger and One Battle After Another. In fact, they might just be the only studio with the mind and the guts to make something like The Camp of the Saints, or a social satire in the vein of Ari Aster’s Eddington and Scapegoat (currently in pre-production, reportedly a film about a Charlie Kirk-esque assassination and the ensuing fallout).
Anything—anything!—other than this. PLEASE!
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM