“Like any good satire, Digger forces us to look at our own human behavior and ask ourselves: can we make the sacrifice?”

“The story is yet to be told.”

All the world’s a stage, as Shakespeare wrote. This is particularly true for the world of politics — the term ‘political theater’ exists for a reason. The tour-de-force centerpiece of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest film Digger, as much a political satire as it is an existential one, definitely underlines this. The titular Digger Rockwell, a Texas oil billionaire played with much panache by Tom Cruise under a layer of prosthetics, finds himself in a room not unlike the British House of Commons (and just as unruly), facing a horde of angry European politicians. The staging of the scene feels very much like a theater. Like a great Shakespearean actor, Digger’s ‘performance’ in front of this crowd enrages, then enraptures his audience. And when he exits stage left, nothing much has changed. This is exactly the point Iñárritu tries to make in Digger, and the message rings loud and clear. So will your head, because he hammers that message home for two hours, although with the best intentions. The question is: can art, be it a movie, a stage play, or a novel, move the political, or even popular needle?

When dark drapes open up like thick globs of oil retreating, Digger Rockwell wakes up in a palatial bedroom to a picture perfect morning outside his window. His background is quickly defined. His walk-in closet filled with cowboy boots and hats, oddly down-to-earth attire for someone who is immediately established as extremely rich, already hints at it (as does Cruise’s attempt at an accent). But then a video call from an engineer at one of his drilling sites in Greenland confirms it: Digger is a Texas oil man, and a mighty successful one at that.

He is also a man who doesn’t like to be told ‘no’. When an expert vet gives Digger the diagnosis that his ailing cat Maggie, the only living creature he seems to have genuine affection for, has anywhere between five minutes and two weeks to live, he promptly fires the man and leaves the feline’s care to his personal physician. But the distress call from this engineer is different. He may try to ignore the man’s story about a widening fissure on the ocean floor leaking highly explosive methane gas, but his Head of Safety & Security, a timid but alarmed scientist by the name of Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), has disturbing news shortly after. The fissure has led to an explosion, which in turn caused a piece of polar ice five times the size of Washington, DC to break off and go adrift (there’s a running gag of Americans not being able to work out the metric system, instead having to have dimensions explained to them in terms they can relate to). This big block of ice is on a crash course with Europe, and now it’s Digger’s problem. And it is a problem he can’t bluff or bully his way out of.

Even so, Digger is a powerful man, exemplified by the fact that the president of the United States (John Goodman), with his cabinet and a gaggle of army leaders in tow, comes down to Texas to assess the situation and find a solution. Can they perhaps nuke the thing? Can they manipulate social media so that word of the impending disaster doesn’t leak until it’s too late? Racist (towards Dr. Ganesh), sexist (towards the women that aren’t in the room), God-fearing and Bible-thumping, president Compson and his entourage of bootlickers, including a wet weasel of a VP played by Michael Stuhlbarg, are an overt reference to the current US administration. The film isn’t subtle, and the fact that the problem originates in Greenland is not a coincidence. Compson in particular turns more Trumpian in his irrationality once the problems start to compound. But these are problems men like him (just like Digger), who are not used to taking no for an answer, simply can’t get rid of. Violence, money, and corruption can’t deter an iceberg. Mother Nature is more powerful than the president of the United States. And any attempt to hide that their drilling for oil, the source of Digger’s massive wealth and of the US’s prosperity, has caused this looming catastrophe will fail.

At the end of the opening act, as Digger and Compson go into a leaky room full of taxidermized animals to have a private aside about the latter’s colon cancer, Iñárritu starts to pull the rug from under us. The fabric of the rug can’t be revealed, but that first tug is abrupt and surprising, although it does make some of the more uncanny elements of the opening act fall into place. Not everything is what it seems, not even while the rug is moving, and the hints are there: keep an eye out for how doors and mirrors are used to unravel the mystery. Iñárritu slowly keeps pulling and pulling, until at the end, as a curtain of oil closes on the film, he reveals the rotten floor underneath. Digger tries to pull all of his showmanship together to make the mess go away without affecting his bottom line, but when the foundation is rotten, at some point the whole house comes down. Decay starts creeping into the film, with water leaking from the roof and wallpaper peeling off. The change has become irreversible, and the collapse is imminent. But who will it affect, and when?

Climate change is clearly Digger‘s driving theme, and not just the role that the oil industry and the politicians in its pockets have played. The film also takes aim at all of us who followed along and became addicted to oil like the fossil fools that we are. It’s a story about greed, power, and responsibility, and it blames not only those who cause catastrophes, but also those who don’t hold them responsible. Our greed also lies at the heart of climate change. Our oil-fueled, consumerism-driven, comfortable lives that we are unwilling to give up. Iñárritu holds up a mirror to the hypocrisy of human behavior just as much as he highlights the evil of those who have the power to change things, but won’t do it out of fear of losing their wealth and influence. In that central set piece, those ten minutes of political theater, the uncomfortable truth stares back at us.

Iñárritu isn’t exactly subtle about it. In fact, he’s shouting it from the rafters, just as his cast is playing to them. The subtext becomes the text here. The message is genuine, but having it repeated ad nauseam through a megaphone is not for everyone. The heightened performances are not the actors’ fault, if they are a fault at all; the rapid-fire dialogue harkens back to the comedies of the previous century, in particular those of the ’30s and ’40s. This frenzied pacing is often enhanced by the editing, especially in scenes where tensions run high and tempers flare. There is a farcical quality to the film, like a Marx Brothers movie in which everyone is angry, although much of the comedy is not necessarily in the dialogue. The film has to perform a balancing act in jumping back and forth through its structural skeleton, and unfortunately it doesn’t always get that balance right. This robs the cast, which further includes the likes of Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Emma D’Arcy, and Robert John Burke in somewhat disposable roles, of a chance to stretch their legs and show some depth to their characters. It will diminish their chances at end-of-year accolades, but more importantly it somewhat undermines the complexity that Iñárritu, in conjunction with Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone, wrote into the script. And that complexity is very much the point.

Visual references for the film run the gamut, ranging from Roy Andersson’s absurdist works and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things to compatriot Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men or even the video game Half-Life. Shooting in VistaVision has given the film a painterly quality when combined with Dennis Gassner’s sumptuous and varied production design, and the images’ high level of detail adds to the intended artifice (much like it did in Poor Things) and underlines the satire. DoP Emmanuel Lubezki shoots many of the close-ups from below and angled, which deepens the intensity of the angry, shouting men that he captures. It all adds to the chaos, a chaos that these same men have created, and combined with the imagery it often makes Digger an abrasive film. That’s not meant as a negative. In the hands of a maximalist like Iñárritu, Digger at times threatens to topple, but while the rhythm and the noise of its many moving cogs may not sway everybody, the director keeps his film far better focused than its more personal predecessor Bardo. The film’s heart is in the right place regarding its main theme, even when it beats so loud it’s almost deafening. Climate change isn’t top of mind anymore in the collective consciousness, replaced by AI and tech bros and genocide (and not ‘genoilcide’, the not-so-clever sign shown during a protest), but Iñárritu attacks the topic head-on in this satire of humanity’s inertia when it comes to its own destruction.

What makes Digger so successful, however, is its intricate structuring. The composition of the film is quite clever, as frustrating as it sometimes can be. With the topical subject of climate change, probably the biggest issue of our time even if it’s generally met with a certain apathy, this provides a strong reminder of the abyss we are all walking toward like lemmings. Is it meant to shake the audience into action, like Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up tried to do a few years ago? Perhaps, but the more pressing question is, does it succeed? Even the film itself doesn’t seem to believe that art can change the world, but Iñárritu is convinced it should still try. “Compliance is freedom“, a slogan spray painted on a wall at one point in the story, is a statement to ponder in the context of the film. Like any good satire, Digger forces us to look at our own human behavior and ask ourselves: can we make the sacrifice?