A satire on greed, pollution, climate change and dirty consciousness worth seeing
A new movie from the Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is always an event, raising expectations after the convincing 2015 neo-western Revenant. So it sounds strange to read that it is an “exasperatingly laborious, self-congratulatory film… the most disappointing of the year: an exasperatingly shallow … satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances” (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/29/digger-review-tom-cruise-satire-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu). Besides, Digger is on course for $245m loss after box office collapse.
This movie is a black, better, a very black comedy, funny and dreadful, about a tycoon’s irresponsible drilling which causes a global ecological and humanitarian crisis. It is a satire on greed, pollution, climate change and dirty consciousness, narrated at two different levels using the old technique of the ‘play within the play’ (within the film this time) of Shakespearean reminiscence. Strange it is to see a fat, boldening, aged Cruise: actually it is difficult to say whether he is more real here than in the eternal youth of his previous films. His character, oil magnate Digger Rockwell, is a mix of Trump, Berlusconi and Citizen Kane, played with almost farcical overacting that makes sense only when a surprising turning point clarifies the choice. Even the finale is a déjà vu seen many times in dystopian movies. Like The Guardian‘s critic, I was quite disappointed while watching, but the day after I felt more open to it: in fact, I think it’s worth seeing it after all. Even movies must be, with Wordsworth’s words, ‘emotions recollected in tranquillity’.