I thought Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s $180 million climate-change movie Digger would be a catastrophe, yet another unbearable Peak Woke movie I would have to force myself to get through without wanting to walk out. It might be that, or at least I’ll remember it that way. Critics pummeled it before it became the lowest box-office earner since Tom Cruise’s Lions for Lambs.
I sat there for the first hour seething with irritation. But the movie started winning me over once it broke out of what it was and became something else. I won’t spoil it for you too much—what are the chances you’ll see it anyway? But the twist is that Digger is a character in a play, and Tom Cruise plays the actor playing Digger, who is embroiled in what’s happening offstage as he tries to finish a tech rehearsal before opening night.
I actually wanted to hate it, truth be told. I wanted it to fail (and I guess it will) because I continue to want there to be a cost for what Hollywood has done to itself and to those of us who lived in movies and always loved disappearing into that dark room to be transported out of the mundane and the miserable.
I also want the Left to pay for co-opting Hollywood and turning it into their personal propaganda machine and thus ruining movies and art over politics. So I guess I thought I’d be able to hate-watch the movie and then write a scathing review. But that’s not exactly how it went with Digger.
I might not be able to call it a great movie (it almost is), or even say I could recommend it to anyone, because it’s not just a rough sit; it’s grotesque. But there is value in it because it crosses the line from pandering to the Left to exposing their hypocrisy, both in terms of the climate activists and those who demand from Hollywood caricatures of their enemies.
Despite the pointed criticisms of Republicans and the so-called racists and misogynists in our government, Digger somehow finds the humanity in its main character, mainly because Tom Cruise is so likable, even as this guy.
I would count it as one of the best films I’ve seen this year, even though I know it’s not a great movie. It’s better than The Odyssey, that’s for sure. It doesn’t shove the wokeness down your throat, even if it does more or less obey the rules. It also states outright that the Left is allergic to telling the truth.
It’s been a while since a Hollywood movie made me think about it and ponder its meaning afterward. I love movies that make me think. It’s either that or entertain my socks off. I don’t know if Digger is entertaining, or at least not for your average person, but I feel like I can’t condemn it because it isn’t what I thought it would be. It’s original. It’s daring. It’s funny, and it made me think. So now I have to eat a little crow for assuming it would be as unbearable as One Battle After Another.
The film community will have no problem sending Digger away with its tail between its legs. They would love for this film, like Ari Aster’s Eddington, to disappear and become a cautionary tale of what might happen to any director who dares to criticize them. If it fails, they never have to heed the message. But make no mistake: Digger was made for them and is (partly) about them.
Eddington , like Digger, can’t deviate completely from the Left’s worldview. For instance, the Left might be silly, but the Right is evil. Even just showing some criticisms of the Left helps, even if they’re still far from humanizing the Right.
Like most movies made during the Peak Woke era, it isn’t aimed at general audiences. This is a $180 million art movie aimed at film critics, Oscar voters, and the ruling class that has been sneering at Donald Trump and his supporters for the past ten years. It might sit alongside Joker: Folie à Deux as a film that spat in the face of its target audience and thus bombed at the box office.
Just as Todd Phillips wanted to withhold the thirst for black-pilled violence and mayhem in Folie à Deux , to absolve himself of the blame for the rise of MAGA, mass shootings, or whatever else came out of the first Joker movie, so too has Iñárritu surprised his audience by not giving them what they so badly crave: yet another chance to indulge in hatred of Republicans.
Its worst crime is being a $180 million movie. It’s an indulgence that perfectly illustrates how Hollywood has so much money it can burn it like this, by releasing a film with no chance of making its money back.
But at the same time, I can’t help but feel grateful that Iñárritu made Digger at all. It’s kind of like Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into X, or David Ellison buying the WB. It takes money to make big movies, and in a fair world, Digger would land that way.
Spoiler warning — if you care about that, skip this part.
Digger, especially the first part, is full of excrement from people, a dying cat, and vomit, and worst of all, bad acting—overacting, screaming into the camera—and I was thinking, I don’t know how I can endure another minute of this. That is, until I realized that I was watching a play within a play, or a movie within a movie. And while that knowledge alone might make the first hour easier to endure, it is still a problem that we have to sit with it for that long.
The truth is that we needed more of the real-world drama and less of the play within a movie, because it hits you over the head with the Left’s apocalyptic worldview of climate change. Even though most people now understand the fears were overblown, this movie exists in a world where the hysteria is valid and our future is bleak.
So many have come out of it seeing it as a cautionary tale for a species that can’t stop on its own but must be stopped. I came to this realization once I started driving across the country and seeing how the real America is laid out. Even if catastrophe were coming, there is nothing we can do about it. We need too much energy, and we need it instantly.
Once everyone gets a load of AI—how easy it is, how it makes our lives run more smoothly—we will need more data centers and more energy. The wealthy elites on the Left exist inside the doomsday cult where every day is the end of the world. Digger validates their deepest fear, but it also reminds them that their obsession with finding enemies wastes time.
The movie within the movie is called Fossil Fools , and it’s meant to be the origin story of the moment the climate reached the level of crisis the Left believes it will. The movie never goes so far as to push back on that delusion, but it does mock, more or less, the people who blame others for climate change rather than themselves.
So those on the Right who believe climate change is a hoax will likely never get over the part of the story that commits fully to the idea that humanity is headed for collapse. But if you’re kind of in the middle, like I am—you understand there is global warming, but it’s not as bad as people like me used to believe, and we’re all in this mess together, despite the Left’s insistence that it’s all the fault of capitalism or the patriarchy or white people—you might like the film.
Ultimately, I have to give Iñárritu credit for taking a big, bold swing—he didn’t need $180 million to do that. But because he made a movie for the Left about the Left, we need much more of it. He could have gone much farther. That he just dances around it is a start. There is still a long way to go. But, to my mind, it’s one of the best of the Peak Woke era, right alongside Eddington.
I probably won't see this film, but I appreciate the analysis. Also, small observation (not a critique) of Mr. Cruise...it might be time to go a little salt and pepper on the hair. I think that would look really good on a man his age and only add to his looks.