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(Review) DIGGER: When the World Ends, Control the Story...or Just Bomb the Iceberg

By. Professor Horror

Some movies you can preview with a synopsis. DIGGER is not one of them. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's latest swerves in ways that would spoil the fun to spell out, so I'll stay purposely vague about where it ends up and focus instead on what happens along the way...and what it feels like to watch. If you've seen Birdman or Bardo, you already know Iñárritu's taste for restless cameras and slippery realities, and for a lead character whose grip on his own story keeps loosening. DIGGER takes that same instinct and turns it toward a billionaire who has never once been told no. There's a Dr. Strangelove vibe running underneath the film (a war room of powerful men steering toward disaster with straight faces) but DIGGER has more on its mind than that comparison alone can cover. This isn't only a satire about powerful people making terrible decisions. It's about what happens after those decisions have been made, and when fixing the catastrophe becomes less important than deciding how everyone else will understand it.

 

The plot itself is simple to state, even if the experience of it isn't: Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is one of the most powerful men alive (largely because of how much oil he controls) and he wants more. He pushes a drilling operation in Greenland past every warning his own scientists give him, and the ice shelf gives way, sending a massive iceberg drifting toward Europe. When Digger is called into a room with the president (John Goodman) and his cabinet, the men spend more time managing how the disaster will look than managing the disaster itself, and their instinct to protect themselves outpaces their instinct to warn anyone. The iceberg hits, and the destruction that follows is staged almost entirely offscreen. We stay locked on the men reacting to news reports and casualty counts from the safety of a paneled room, as if the tragedy only becomes real once someone in power reacts to it. That choice matters because DIGGER is less interested in showing us catastrophe than showing us the people who get to explain catastrophe afterward. Riz Ahmed (as the scientist Dr. Ganesh) spends the film saying exactly what needs to be said and watching it go nowhere, which becomes its own kind of dark joke: the one person telling the truth is treated as the least useful person in the room.

At the forefront of the film is Cruise, who disappears into Digger almost completely, buried under makeup and prosthetics that leave him soft, sagging, and hard to recognize. More important than the physical transformation, though, is the confidence Cruise gives him, because Digger has spent so long convincing people that he is the smartest person in the room that he seems to have convinced himself too. Every warning can be dismissed, every failure can be reframed, and even catastrophe can become an opportunity if he can find the right way to explain it. Cruise plays him less like a grotesque billionaire villain than a man who desperately needs to remain the protagonist of his own story, which makes Riz Ahmed's Dr. Ganesh such an effective counterweight. Ganesh actually understands what is happening, repeatedly tells everyone what needs to be done, and has almost no power to make anyone listen. Ahmed doesn't turn that frustration into grand speeches or righteous heroics. Instead, much of the comedy comes from watching a reasonable person trapped in increasingly unreasonable conversations, trying to explain reality to men who believe authority gives them the power to negotiate with it. Digger can control a room because he knows how to sell a story, while Ganesh has the considerably harder job of telling people something they don't want to hear, and the film understands how little value truth has when everyone around it is more invested in appearances. John Goodman's president pushes that absurdity even further, responding to uncertainty with anger and treating volume as a substitute for understanding. When another iceberg threatens Alaska, his solution is to bomb it, turning one enormous problem into radioactive fragments scattered across the globe, and even that failure immediately becomes something that needs to be presented as decisive leadership. The three men ultimately represent very different relationships to reality: Ganesh tries to understand it, the president thinks he can overpower it, and Digger believes that if he can control the story people tell about it, he never really has to admit that he was wrong.

 

That's where DIGGER's satire gets nastiest. The film understands that power isn't only the ability to make decisions. It's the ability to decide what those decisions mean afterward. Digger has enough money to cause a catastrophe, enough access to sit in the room where the response is determined, and enough cultural authority to start rewriting the disaster before anyone has finished counting the dead. Everyone else experiences consequences, but he experiences a public-relations problem. The distinction between controlling events and controlling their narrative becomes increasingly important because Digger eventually confronts something even his money can't manage....reality. If you can't control the iceberg, control what people believe about the iceberg. If you can't prevent catastrophe, become the man who tried to save everyone from it. And if your solution makes everything worse, make sure you're standing at the microphone when somebody asks what happened.

 

 

The sets deserve their own mention, since every room Digger occupies is dressed down to the carpet fibers and the murals on the walls, an environment so meticulously built that it starts to feel less like a home than a stage constructed for a life he's been performing for a long time. That word...performing...ends up mattering more than it seems to at first. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, shooting in VistaVision, let the camera drift through these rooms in long, patient takes that recall the hallway wanderings of Birdman, except here the theater Digger occupies is his whole life, not just his career. The enormous rooms also make the men inside them look strangely small. They have extraordinary power over what happens outside those walls, but within them they're pacing, shouting, arguing, and improvising like performers who have forgotten their lines. The world may be ending somewhere beyond the room, but inside it the show has to continue.

 

And that's why the comedy matters. Digger could easily have been two hours of wealthy men destroying the planet while scientists beg them to listen (which at this point might feel less like satire than checking the news). Instead, Iñárritu keeps finding absurdity inside catastrophe. A radioactive iceberg is horrifying, but there's also something undeniably funny about a room full of powerful adults talking about rectal cancer and just being completely unaware of their own stupidity. The laughter doesn't erase the horror of what is happening. It gives the people watching it a way to endure the horror together. There is something communal about sitting in a theater while the world onscreen falls apart and hearing everyone around you laugh at the same impossible stupidity. For a few seconds, the joke creates agreement where almost nothing else can. We all recognize the absurdity. We all understand why it's funny. And maybe that shared recognition matters more when everything outside the theater feels increasingly incapable of producing it.

 

 

That's also why creation becomes so important to the film. Making something, telling a story, staging a joke, or simply finding a reason to laugh doesn't stop the iceberg. DIGGER isn't naïve enough to suggest that art fixes climate change or that comedy absolves the people responsible for catastrophe. Instead, creation becomes a way of deciding what we do with the experience of living through one. Digger understands storytelling as another form of ownership, something that allows him to reshape failure until he can still recognize himself as the hero. The film offers something more communal. Sitting together in the dark and laughing at powerful men making catastrophically stupid decisions doesn't change what they've done, but it gives everyone else a way to recognize the absurdity together. Digger (the character) wants a story he can own, while DIGGER (the movie) wants an audience that can share one.

 

That idea becomes more complicated as the movie gets stranger. I can't say much about where DIGGER goes without ruining the parts that shouldn't be ruined, except that the ground eventually shifts beneath the story and changes our understanding of what kind of movie we've been watching. Suddenly, choices that seemed merely absurd begin to carry different weight, and Iñárritu asks us to reconsider not only Digger but our own position as spectators. The satire hasn't disappeared, but it no longer feels like the film's final destination. What begins as a story about powerful men responding disastrously to a crisis gradually becomes something more curious about why we create in the first place (particularly when the world outside gives us plenty of reasons to despair). The answer isn't that stories save us from catastrophe. Maybe that's what makes DIGGER feel unexpectedly hopeful beneath all its cynicism. The world can be ending outside and the people in charge can be making everything exponentially worse (somebody can even decide that the obvious solution is to bomb the fucking iceberg). And still...people make things. They tell stories, they sit together, and they laugh. None of that fixes the world, but DIGGER argues that it might be part of what makes the world worth fixing in the first place.