First reactions to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” are officially in after early New York and Los Angeles press screenings over the last few days. The London premiere is meanwhile underway. Along with the upcoming “Dune: Part Three,” the apocalyptic satire starring Tom Cruise as an ostentatious oil baron in “Dr. Strangelove” mode is one of Warner Bros.’ major fall Oscar players.
Four-time nominee Cruise, 64, has never won a competitive Oscar despite claiming an Honorary Academy Award last year. The “Top Gun: Maverick” star is already on the campaign trail, with a first-look GQ interview that was hardly dishy but included a semi-shirtless photo spread suggesting a potentially vulnerable tell-all. (An empty promise, alas, in a mostly boilerplate sit-down with the global star.)
In the ambitiously scaled film co-written by Iñárritu with Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone (“Birdman”) plus Sabina Berman, Cruise plays the outsize, oblivious-to-the-outside-world oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. He’s told that drilling in Greenland has not only caused a dire expulsion of methane gas but that it’s also dislodged an ice shelf from a glacier, and it’s barreling toward Europe, with the potential to trigger a tsunami and cause cataclysmic disaster.
His chaotic orbit includes Riz Ahmed as scientist Ganesh, Sandra Hüller as Digger’s irascible half-sister and business partner, John Goodman as the dictatorial U.S. president with anal cancer, Michael Stuhlbarg as the feckless vice president, and Jesse Plemons as a mystery figure whose role comes into focus late in the film. There’s also a sure-to-be-divisive twist fairly early in the movie that upends its entire premise.
First reactions are predictably all over the map for “Digger,” ranging from praise for its audaciousness as a studio film to criticism for its “unfunny” satire about the end of the world. Either way, “the divide on this one is going to be wide,” as Variety’s Clayton Davis noted. IndieWire’s Anne Thompson called it “a brave and gorgeous art film.” Critics are especially divided about the over-the-top performances, though both Cruise and Ahmed’s turns already draw strong praise. We’ve rounded up tweets below.
Iñárritu’s trusted cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki returns, with Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner (“Bugsy”) supplying an intentionally dreary yet meticulously rendered end-times vibe. Cruise is also layered beneath a great deal of prosthetics work, which the actor claims he notched down from taking six hours to just one in the makeup chair.
IndieWire previously reported a $125 million budget (or higher, per some insiders) on “Digger” — hardly Iñárritu’s highest when stacked up against his Best Director-winning 2015 wintry survival epic “The Revenant.” With marketing and awards campaign spend, the film will need to make upwards of $300 million worldwide to break even, according to an insider we spoke to.
See a sampling of Tuesday’s first reactions to “Digger” below. The film opens wide, including on IMAX and in VistaVision in several locations, on October 2.
