“Digger,” the new film by Alejandro G. Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise, has drawn mostly savage reviews. Critics have pounced on the writing, the acting, the production, the structure. Every aspect of it.
But whatever you think of “Digger,” one thing about it can’t be ignored: It is a climate movie.
In fact, “Digger” is one of the biggest-budget, widest-release, starriest pieces of climate media ever made.
The first film of Cruise’s post- “Mission Impossible” career, “Digger” was billed as the action star’s return to serious acting. For Iñárritu, a visionary director, it was a foray into a new genre: satire. And for Warner Bros., it was a $125 million bet that audiences would come along for the ride.
So far, in the week since its release, box office demand has been weak and “Digger” is on track to be a flop. That suggests the film may reach a limited audience, which is a shame.
Because despite whatever else is going on with the film, “Digger” is one of the most audacious attempts yet to communicate the causes of global warming, its potentially catastrophic effects and who is to blame.
On the press tour, Cruise has not engaged directly with the issue of climate change. But Iñárritu is trying to confront this moment head-on, he told my colleague Melena Ryzik.
Iñárritu was initially drawn to the subject when, while shooting his 2015film “The Revenant,” he was hard pressed to find ice in Argentina. Then, as he worked on “Digger,” fiction became fact.
“The things that we imagined nine years ago start happening,” he said. “At that time, there was no ice shelf being detached. And suddenly it happened. Greenland was not in the conversation; methane was not in the mainstream language of the media. Now, methane is one of the biggest monsters ever.”
An epic catastrophe
The movie’s main plot focuses on Digger Rockwell, a fictional Texas oil baron who sets off an environmental catastrophe.
One of Digger’s oil rigs in Greenland causes a methane leak in the ocean. A pipeline ruptures, and a $1 billion oil rig explodes, setting off an avalanche. The avalanche cleaves a crack into the ice and sends a massive ice shelf headed toward Northern Europe.
As the calamity unfolds, the characters say lines steeped in the minutiae of contemporary climate news.
They compare the heat-trapping power and half-life of carbon dioxide with those of methane. They discuss how oil companies engage in greenwashing by promoting clean energy. There is a reference to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as COP, short for “conference of the parties.”
And in an echo of some of the most extreme arguments made by activists, Digger is accused of genocide. He’s called out for knowing that the relentless burning of oil and gas would lead to planetary catastrophe, and for deceiving the public about the risks. It’s an argument not so different from the one the Supreme Court heard on Monday.
“Digger” includes a series of twists that challenge viewers to re-evaluate the film multiple times. Setting aside whether or not it works as art, what becomes clear as the movie concludes is that Iñárritu is deadly serious about the threats posed by the rapid pace of global warming, and that he is trying to warn viewers about the world to come.
The climate message
“Digger” isn’t the first big-budget climate film. “Don’t Look Up,” a star-studded parody about humanity’s inability to seriously confront a problem in the face of imminent disaster, was a streaming hit when Netflix released it in 2021.
“The Day After Tomorrow,” from 2004, imagined what might happen when the conveyor belt of ocean currents that carries warm water toward Northern Europe falters. (Spoiler alert: The Northern Hemisphere is plunged into a new ice age overnight.)
When “The Day After Tomorrow” came out, that scenario was squarely in the realm of science fiction. But today, scientists are mounting an urgent effort to understand just how fast those currents, known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, are changing, and whether a rapid change in Europe’s climate could occur this century.
More climate films are on the way, including “A Statement” this fall. The film, starring Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti, dramatizes a real-life 1980 meeting in Florida at which 20 experts discussed what to do about global warming.
Nearly half a century after that meeting, the world is still trying to coordinate an effective response.
“This film is a disaster movie,” Iñárritu said of “Digger.” “But the disaster is us.”
Old power plants, new nuclear power
Building a nuclear power plant is a long, hard slog. So, lately, many companies are eyeing a faster, cheaper solution: squeezing even more power out of old reactors that were built decades ago.
This process, known as a “power uprate,” involves upgrading key components inside nuclear plants, such as controls, turbines or pumps, so that they can generate more electricity. These upgrades can cost billions and require approval by regulators, but they can often be completed in five years or less and at a fraction of the cost of building a nuclear plant from scratch.
With demand for power rising as artificial intelligence booms, many tech giants are eager to pay for these upgrades. Increasing production from existing nuclear plants could ultimately add as much as 6,000 to 8,000 megawatts of electric capacity to U.S. grids, companies and analysts estimate. That’s roughly equivalent to building six to eight giant new reactors.
Google, for example, is investing in new nuclear plants to fuel its data centers. But uprating older plants is “the fastest way to get new additional clean capacity online confidently and reliably,” Amanda Peterson Corio, the company’s global head of energy and power, said in an interview. — Brad Plumer and Rebecca F. Elliott
More climate news from around the web:
-
A year-old collaboration called ShadeLA is promoting alternative sources of shade, like pop-up canopies, that can fill the gaps where trees aren’t growing to fight urban heat.
-
The Financial Times reports on one of the more baffling climate questions: Why do studies and polls across the world consistently show that men care less about global warming than women?
-
Aerial surveys found that almost two-thirds of the population of chinstrap penguins have disappeared from a remote volcanic island near Antarctica, the BBC reports. According to the research team, climate change is affecting the birds’ food supply and survival.
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here.
Follow The New York Times on Instagram, Threads, Facebook and TikTok at @nytimes.
Reach us at [email protected]. We read every message, and reply to many!
The post Tom Cruise, Climate Warrior? appeared first on New York Times.
