Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), a billionaire oil tycoon, has his life thrown into disarray when one of his oil plants causes a potentially apocalyptic disaster.
Alejandro González Iñárritu has often been a polarising filmmaker. Depending on your view, his style is either bravura technical audacity or pure indulgence. At his best, his wild trickery amplifies compelling characters. Birdman‘s single shot echoes a man’s inability to escape himself. The Revenant‘s relentless bloody chaos reflects the savagery of a man’s life, inside and out. One of many frustrating things about Digger is that all Iñárritu’s exquisite staging and narrative Russian doll-ing aren’t in service of anything particularly effective. The presentation is challenging but Digger doesn’t dig very deep.
Iñárritu kicks us into his film like a boot from behind. The titular character, an elderly oil tycoon played by Tom Cruise encased in prosthetics from balding head to bum crack, is roused from bed by an urgent call. Within minutes, one of Digger’s Arctic oil fields has ruptured, an iceberg named Judy is on her way to decimate Scandinavia, the US President’s on the phone, and the end of the world looks distinctly possible. There’s no time to steady yourself. The dizzying momentum continues as Digger (sort of) tries to avert Armageddon.
For a film about the complexity of mankind, it shows scant interest in actual people.
This becomes wearing rather than exciting because there’s nobody for us to grip onto as we hurtle along. We’re as adrift as Judy amid a sea of characters with little interior life. Digger is a bumptious blowhard. A fantastic supporting cast — Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons — each play a single note. Only Riz Ahmed, as a conflicted scientist who could have bumbled in from a Wes Anderson picture, has any dimension. An early meta twist tries to give the story some grounding and explain away the cartoonishness, but it doesn’t entirely make sense, even by its own logic, and functions mostly as a way for Iñárritu to comment on his own work. This is the film’s chief problem— that it appears more concerned with itself than with the audience. Its apparent message — that the planet’s dying and we’re complicit, as much as we crave villains to blame — is delivered in almost hectoring terms, often in loud monologues. For a film about the complexity of mankind, it shows scant interest in actual people.
If the whole isn’t successful, elements are. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography and Dennis Gassner’s production design achieve the Kubrickian grandeur Iñárritu clearly intends. Cruise emerges with a win, reminding us how riveting he can be as an actor, not just as a movie star. A role so oversized and absurd demands fearless commitment, which he certainly gives. The big swing is laudable. If only the film were more rewarding.
Visually impressive, and Cruise gives his all. But Digger doesn’t have much going on beneath the surface. A disappointing waste of a superb team.
