Last week, this magazine published a review of Digger, the new climate change allegory from Mexican provocateur Alejandro Iñárritu. In it, my colleague Jake Bittle explains in detail why he “hated it.” 

I was skeptical of the bad reviews that Digger has been getting; after all, I like more of the Iñárritu films I’ve seen than not. I would even call one of them (his 2001 debut, Amores Perros) a cinematic masterpiece. (Birdman was fine.) In any case, most of the time a Mexican person is in the news, I am invested in their success, so I decided to see the movie for myself. 

Even then — two hours, nine minutes, and a small popcorn later — I was surprised by my reaction: I simply loved the movie. Despite the negative reviews and poor box-office numbers, Digger is a film well-worth seeing — and talking about. To do that fully, this review contains spoilers. 

Digger is Iñárritu’s most ambitious, visually maximalist, thematically convoluted, and sonically grating movie yet. Or as Jake puts it, yes, it is “ugly, loud, and unpleasant,” but I didn’t mind the sensory overload. In fact, it’s part of why I liked it. There are plenty of movies that try to capture the non-stop roar of the so-called unprecedented times we live in: Sorry to Bother You, Uncut Gems, and Eddington come to mind. These movies offer up cacophony as a form of contemporary social commentary. They’re grating on purpose, because that’s often how waking up, checking your phone, and heading to work feels. 

Digger joins the ranks of these unsubtle, borderline noxious films; it features fiery accidents, signs of planetary collapse, bumbling bureaucrats, casual sexism, decaying pet animals, and bouts of senseless violence. But it also stars Tom Cruise in one of his weirdest roles ever, which is truly a delight to watch. 

Digger revolves around a morally unsound man named Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon (played by Cruise) who ignores warnings from climate scientists that he should stop drilling in the Arctic. A crack has formed in the ice sheet and is leaking methane into the atmosphere — and it’s only likely to get bigger, they say, posing a massive threat to life and property. When their warnings come to pass and an explosion at Rockwell’s oil operation in Greenland triggers a monstrous ice shelf to break off and drift toward Europe, Rockwell and the president of the United States (played by a ghoulish John Goodman), who helped facilitate the drilling, start to panic. These cartoonish men are, clearly, avatars for the real-life architects of the climate crisis: the companies that knew what they were doing, and the powerful governments that delayed meaningful action to correct such oversights. 

Iñárritu takes pleasure in portraying them as howling windbags, targets of both ire from Ganesh, the film’s noble climate scientist played by Riz Ahmed, and of laughter from the audience. The way Rockwell and President Compson stumble through their hubris is often funny, but the laughs are closely followed by discomfort. Uncanny shots of trees falling in the background (only to be propped back up again?) begin to disorient the viewer. You think you’re watching a satire about the bad guys who started this mess, and then a crack in the movie’s narrative world appears. 

At its heart, Digger presents the problem we have with climate change as one of narrative: What is the story about how things went wrong, and who gets to tell it? Its answers might get Iñárritu called a doomer, but I found the way he intellectualizes our current predicament too compelling to look away from. (Spoilers start here!) 

Iñárritu pulls back a curtain, and reveals that Cruise is not actually Digger Rockwell; he’s an actor named Curtis Markson, and he’s playing Rockwell in a stage play. More specifically, Markson is an actor struggling to understand his character’s internal motivations. Here is where Cruise really shines: not as a laughable villain, but as a tortured artist trying to tell the story of the greatest crisis of our time. Goodman and Ahmed are, likewise, actors in supporting roles in this play-within-a-movie. 

As the movie goes on and more details of the theatric production are slowly revealed, this structure offers up more complicating questions for the viewer. Why stage a play about climate change in the first place? Isn’t it bad enough to have to live through global warming without figuring out what to say about it? These questions are aimed at Iñárritu as much as they are at Hannah, the “hip” theatre director (played by the wonderful Sophie Wilde) tussling with a pedantic Markson. These two cannot agree on the nature of what they’re doing onstage. Is the story of climate change a farcical comedy or a devastating tragedy? What would be the point of telling it either way?

The answers offered by Digger will certainly alienate some audiences. During tech rehearsal, Hannah explodes at Markson, saying the purpose of art is to comfort the dispossessed, especially those whose families were lost or displaced by climate change. The point, she argues, is to laugh at Markson as Rockwell, and the sooner he gets onboard, the better. At this point, the viewer learns that an iceberg really did take untold lives throughout Europe, and the play is a cult classic detailing how the Rockwell family attempted to profit off of disaster. 

Exactly why and how the play is being staged 25 years after these horrific events is a juicy twist I won’t share here. Suffice to say, Digger is concerned with legacy, and Iñárritu, the first and only Mexican filmmaker to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture twice, clearly is too. “The movie is not perfect,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview. He did it anyway because, as he put it, “I like taking risks.” Digger feels like the director’s latest bid to cement himself as an auteur, and it also feels like a vehicle for a potentially unpopular idea. Maybe art can’t change the world and maybe we shouldn’t expect it to — at least not when a tsunami is approaching. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong. on Oct 9, 2026.