So what is our screwed-up world coming to? Action-adventure superstar Tom Cruise makes a smart, funny film and it’s proclaimed one of the biggest flops of the year? Perhaps the critics can’t take a joke. Digger is filled with them, from the slapstick spasms of a dying (but beloved) cat to a pale, pudgy Tom Cruise showing his butt crack as he gets dressed. At times it’s silly and raucous, and other times philosophical and thoughtful. From my limited anecdotal evidence, Digger was a hit at the showing I attended at 2 p.m. in the afternoon (the only showtime!): I thought the theater would be empty but it had a decent crowd, and I heard others laughing as well.
Perhaps the pre-release hoopla focused a bit too much on Cruise. He’s hardly the only star. The cast is terrific, with a slimmed-down John Goodman as President, Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President, Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, the chief environmental-risk scientist, and many others. Most of the actors get to shine with funny moments, such as Stuhlbarg’s comic grimacing as a giant iceberg rams Europe and causes devastation, or Goodman’s many hijinks, such as when he demands the “nuclear football” to press the red button, all because he doesn’t like the Chinese. Let’s not forget the incomparable Jesse Plemons, who doesn’t get any funny lines but has an important role, and even gets his moment with a scenery-chewing speech in front of the entire cast.
Plemons is a good character to analyze for the movie’s charms, twists, and intricacies. His first scene in the film is rather late. I for one noticed his soft-spoken appearance and wondered “What is Jesse Plemons doing here?” I didn’t quite catch his introduction, as in who he was supposed to be. His hair and outfit made him seem like a bit of a dandy. But when his identity and role are revealed near the film’s end, it makes total sense and provides an important clue as to what it’s all about.
That’s one thing I think critics should praise, and as far as I’ve seen, seldom do: Digger is full of mysteries, true. Maybe some of the critics weren’t sharp enough to pick up on the clues to solve those. By the time the credits roll, all of the main mysteries have been solved and the audience should walk away knowing what exactly happened—which, until then, is at times certainly murky.
Digger is actually the latest in a line of great satires about apocalyptic catastrophes. Perhaps it most resembles Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Riz Ahmed, playing the environmental-impact specialist Ganesh, at times plays a Dr. Strangelove-type role as he describes the various dire environmental impacts of a Greenland oil-drilling mishap that sends Europe into a tailspin. John Goodman as the U.S. President fits nicely as Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack Ripper, descending into apocalyptic madness and rationalizing it as the way things go.
At the film’s end it seems we’ve walked out of the movie theater right into the hallways of the Apple TV series Silo. Everything is gray and grimy. The image of a post-apocalyptic world is both mundane and frightening: It seems to be a wrecked London. There are canals filled with water and debris, the hulks of automobiles jumbled together in the water and wreckage. Beside a tank manned by a soldier who is getting pelted with rocks there’s a stack of fallen robot soldiers. Graffiti on a concrete embankment states Compliance = Freedom. (It’s like a weekend in Paris!)
Lastly, director Alejandro G. Inarritu pulls off the mix of comedy, satire, action, and fourth-wall meta-ness with a bold touch. If you want a comparison, it most resembles his (big hit) Birdman (2014). But I don’t want to give it all way. See Digger. It’s way fun.