Digger’s box-office stumble meets a critic’s climate-satire defence
Tom Cruise’s new film reportedly opened to $20 million globally. A Guardian critic argues its story within a story is part of the point.
Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Digger is reportedly projected to lose around $150 million after taking $20 million globally in its opening weekend. The film has drawn poor reviews, but a critic writing for The Guardian argues that its divisive form may be obscuring its subject.
Spoilers follow. Cruise plays Curtis Markson, an actor portraying oil tycoon Digger Rockwell in a stage production set decades after a fictional oil-rig disaster in Greenland sends a glacier towards Europe. The play, Fossil Fools, is funded by Rockwell’s nephew and made as an act of apparent penance for the family’s legacy.
The Guardian critic reads the film as a satire about climate catastrophe and the limits of art: Fossil Fools is deliberately clumsy, while Markson resists playing Rockwell as a cartoon. Their dispute over whether the play is satire, farce or a poor retelling becomes part of the film’s argument about the distance between performance and reality.
The critic suggests that audiences and reviewers can struggle to distinguish the play’s flaws from the film around it. In that reading, Digger’s question is less whether art can tell the truth about catastrophe than whether people want truth, or reassurance of what they already believe.
The film ends with Markson receiving a standing ovation before an alarm sends the audience out in gas masks. The critic sees the scene as a measure of art’s limits: it may offer catharsis, but cannot itself avert disaster.
