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.
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