#REVIEW: “DIGGER”

Review by Nicholas Porteous for Mr. Will Wong

Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is an oil baron with seemingly unlimited wealth. He tends to his terminally ill cat, ignoring numerous warnings that something horribly wrong is brewing just under the surface of his massive oil refinery in Greenland. When the shit hits the fan and a massive iceberg hurtles towards Europe, Digger must devise a strategy with the President (John Goodman) and every branch of the US government to contain the unfolding apocalyptic fiasco. Unfortunately, the room of old white guys can’t think of much beyond ‘wait and see’. Sound familiar? Digger is Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s extravagant, IMAX-sized funhouse mirror held up to civilization. It’s a multi-layered rebuke to our modern, oil-driven existence AS WELL AS our satirical response to the very same. It’s a swing so big, it eats other big swings for breakfast. It’s a LOT of things. But is it successful? Upon first glance, yes and no.

Let’s talk surface-level before we drill down: Digger is a visual extravaganza. Every frame (courtesy of Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) is absolutely dripping with delicious detail. The Odyssey broke ground this year as the first film shot entirely in IMAX, but Digger fills that towering frame with way more shiny bits and pieces. When Digger visits a United Nations-esque world forum to wax poetic about our seemingly inevitable doom, it’s easy to get lost in the dozens of tiny performances unfolding around Cruise. Watching Digger in any other format means you’ll be missing out. The Movie is also drowning in extreme closeups, particularly of Cruise, Goodman and Riz Ahmed (as Ganesh, arguably the only advisor approaching sanity) but their faces feel like quaking landscapes, just as intricate as those extended sets. Not one performer in the staggering ensemble–not even the likes of Sandra Huller, Jesse Plemons, or Emma D’Arcy–is playing it cool here. The makeup is also mesmerising. Cruise is draped in prosthetics, and every crevice of Goodman‘s visage is open for business. I genuinely didn’t know his face could perform these acrobatics.

Solely on the basis of its aesthetics, Digger‘s a home run. But there’s a whole lot more going on here, and it’s a headscratcher. Digger‘s screenplay is bombastic–subtle as a shovel to your face, loud as a foghorn–and delivered by a Foghorn Leghorn-adjacent lead! It is as perplexing as it is straightforward. There’s a nihilism behind all the pageantry, and sometimes it wags a finger in your face without a shred of subtext or self-reflection. The joke-to-laugh ratio is low, but Cruise, Ahmed and Goodman’s full-bodied commitment to the bit is Digger‘s consistent saving grace. It is decidedly a message movie rather than a fully-fledged drama, often abandoning its characters for the sake of a broader cultural critique. Is the juice worth the squeeze? I’m on the fence. It’s a lot harder to embrace Digger after one viewing because it so resolutely keeps us at arm’s length.

It’s difficult not to appreciate the sheer construction of Digger. It’s a gargantuan cinematic object that–love it or hate it–must be seen to be fully believed. Can you dig it?

Warner Bros. Pictures Canada release DIGGER Friday, October 2, 2026.