Should you see a Looney Tunes–esque satire that stars Tom Cruise in prosthetics portraying a loud caricature of an American oilman, that’s currently on track to be one of the biggest box-office failures of all time?
Absolutely yes—and it’s a movie that rewired my expectations of what a movie about climate change should be. Digger, the critically panned, exorbitantly expensive new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, calls into question the purpose of art and even the basic purpose of telling the truth in the face of a capitalist machine churning the world toward climate disaster. The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what kind of characters we’re the most comfortable making into climate villains.
(Spoilers ahead—if you have any plans to see the movie, I really would encourage you to do so first before reading on.)
The film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who only wears cowboy boots and lives in a mansion covered in antlers and polar bear skin rugs. At the start of the film, one of Digger’s oil-drilling platforms accidentally causes a massive iceberg to break loose, resulting in a huge methane leak. With catastrophe impending, he has to alert the president (John Goodman, putting in a performance reminiscent of his best work with the Coen brothers) as the iceberg barrels toward Europe.
The trailers play up the movie as a too-broad-it’s-painful satire of American oilmen and how a Trumpian-inspired religious-right administration would respond to a real climate disaster. Iñárritu, however, lets us in on the secret early: The farce we’re watching is actually a play within the movie, being performed in a theater with a leaky ceiling that keeps losing power. Tom Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather an actor playing Digger Rockwell.
We eventually learn that the play, Fossil Fools, depicts events that actually happened some decades ago. From then on, you’re aware that every joke, every villainous portrayal of Digger and the president as Really Bad Guys, is for two audiences: moviegoers in 2026 and theatergoers living in a dystopian future.
From the trailers, I’d initially thought that the movie was going to be similar to Adam McKay’s blockbuster Don’t Look Up, a climate satire that drew record numbers of viewers on Netflix when it aired in 2021. Don’t Look Up puts scientists racing to inform the public about an impending asteroid collision and pushing to avert catastrophe against corporate and political interests that have other plans. McKay, at the time, said the film’s purpose was to make “people less tolerant of inaction from their leaders.” If the media—journalists, filmmakers, and the like—could correctly inform the public about the risks of climate change, the film (and its accompanying calls to action) posited, we would begin to see progress on cutting emissions.
Digger, similarly, deals with themes around climate misinformation. Digger admits he ignored alerts from his own company about the unfolding crisis on his drilling platforms. Goodman’s president and his cabinet decide to deploy a “firewall” that censors out all mentions of the climate crisis (including the phrase “Al Gore”) to control the narrative of what’s happening.
But where Don’t Look Up’s thesis is that action would happen if we just communicated the truth better, Digger takes a much more nihilistic view—that the truth has no value. Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s long-suffering environmental expert, angrily tells the oilman that he is going to tell the truth about his company and climate change to a crowd of European Union leaders, and keeps his promise. (Ganesh makes the first reference to the “Exxon Knew” investigation I can recall in a major movie.)
Digger watches from a back room, then, in a ripping speech that forms the backbone of the movie, he tells the hostile European delegates that he, like other oilmen, knew that their product would cause runaway climate change. But that doesn’t matter, he crows. The world is hooked on oil, and the people in that very room have found a myriad of uses for it.
“You want energy to ask AI to solve the very same disasters that it’s fueling,” he says to the assembled delegates. “You want freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable lives.” He ultimately leverages Ganesh’s truth-telling to avoid accountability—strolling out of parliament as members fight among themselves.
The bombastic portrayal of Digger Rockwell is, too, a rumination on what kind of truths we get as an audience and who the most palatable climate evildoers are. In between rehearsal takes of the increasingly outrageous Fossil Fools, we see Cruise grapple with how to play Digger, noting he watched hours of footage and found him not to be a finger-gunning shooting fool with a Texas drawl but a conniving, sharp businessman. But the play’s audience, watching Fossil Fools in a world Digger helped ruin, are not looking for truth—they’re looking for catharsis. Near the end of the film, an incredible late twist reveals the play has a wealthy benefactor with a vested interest in having it performed.
One of my big critiques of Don’t Look Up was the notion that a Hollywood movie could be an agent for change; that the movie’s star, Leonardo di Caprio, who parties on superyachts and takes private jets, could tell people to listen to scientists and just vote our way out of this mess. Digger essentially spits in the face of Don’t Look Up’s existence, pointing out that enjoying satire about climate change that paints specific villains like Digger Rockwell comes at the risk of ignoring forms of corporate power more palatable to liberal viewers.
This all may seem pretty nihilist, and I don’t think the movie is intended to be cheery. But I also don’t think it’s a message to not make art. Rather, Digger strives to be a reflection of our current reality, where truth often doesn’t matter, and art is often funded by the very powers it rails against. While Don’t Look Up was intended to be a call to action, Digger simply kicks back and says to viewers: This is where we are.
Five years after a record number of people watched Don’t Look Up, the Trump administration is back in power and has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement again. The government is gleefully doubling down on “Drill, Baby, Drill.” Tech corporations that in the Don’t Look Up era were touting their goals to cut emissions and even reverse past damage are now walking those back, thanks to the AI boom—which, they promise, will help solve climate change someday. And here I am, typing on my computer, driving a car around that uses fossil fuels.
That Digger is the last film to come out of Warner Bros. before David Ellison’s purchase of the studio only underscores the role that wealthy, conservative individuals are increasingly playing in controlling the arts. In the end, I most appreciate Digger for pointing out the absurdity of the whole thing.
The post Everyone Hates ‘Digger.’ It’s the Perfect Climate Movie appeared first on Wired.
