Somewhere between the existential dread of a planet on fire and the sweaty, scrambling energy of a man who just realized he left the stove on, there's Digger - Alejandro G. Iñárritu's latest, which hit theaters September 28 and has been living rent-free in everyone's heads ever since.
The premise alone is enough to make you do a double-take: Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, described as "the most powerful man in the world," who embarks on a frantic mission to prove he's humanity's savior - before the disaster he's unleashed destroys everything. That's not a logline so much as a ticking clock attached to a ego the size of a small moon. And Iñárritu, the man who gave us Birdman and The Revenant, is exactly the kind of filmmaker who'd look at that setup and think: yes, but what if we made it funny?
Because that's the tightrope this movie walks. TMDb has it tagged as both Comedy and Drama, and at 129 minutes, that's a lot of room to swing between gut-busting and gut-wrenching. This is the same director who once made a film that felt like one continuous panic attack (Birdman), so pairing him with Cruise - an actor whose entire brand is running - feels almost too on-the-nose. Almost.
Cruise's Digger isn't your standard-issue doomsday billionaire, at least not on paper. He's a man convinced of his own messianic role in human history, which is a very different flavor of delusion than we usually get on screen. The disaster is his. The savior complex is his. The math, presumably, is not mathing. Watching the world's most powerful man try to outrun his own consequences is the kind of premise that writes its own tension - and Iñárritu has never been shy about turning tension into something physical, visceral, almost unbearable.
The cast around him is stacked in a way that suggests nobody wanted to miss this one. Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh - and if you know anything about the remover of obstacles, the name alone is a loaded gun on the mantel. John Goodman steps in as President Compson, which is exactly the kind of casting that makes you nod before you even see a frame. Sandra Hüller, fresh off her Anatomy of a Fall and Zone of Interest era, plays Emma. Michael Stuhlbarg is the Vice President. Jesse Plemons is Kenny, and honestly, Jesse Plemons playing a guy named Kenny in a movie about the apocalypse is its own genre. Robert John Burke and Emma D'Arcy round out the ensemble as Fitzgerald and Lena, respectively.
It's the kind of cast that reads like a fever dream of prestige drama and pop-culture maximalism - which, again, tracks. Iñárritu doesn't do small. He does sweeping, spiraling, morally queasy epics dressed up as character studies, and Digger sounds like he's applying that formula to the end of the world and the man who accidentally started the countdown.
The title itself is doing a lot of work. "Digger" could be a name, a verb, a warning. Dig too deep, dig your own grave, dig yourself out of the hole you made. Cruise's character is a man who's presumably been digging for a long time - into the earth, into his own mythology, into whatever makes him feel like the center of the story. The question the film seems to be asking isn't whether he can save humanity. It's whether he can even admit he's the reason it needs saving.
With a TMDb rating of 7.707 out of 10, audiences are already split somewhere between awe and argument - which is exactly where Iñárritu tends to live. This isn't a movie that wants you comfortable. It wants you squirming, laughing at the wrong moments, and then sitting in silence while the credits roll.
Digger is in theaters now. Bring a friend who likes to argue.
