THE OFFICIAL FINAL TRAILER · WARNER BROS. PICTURES
This is the first film I can think of that could be the last great film we may see.
THE THESIS — DAVID THOMSON, UNHERD
Digger, Alejandro Iñárritu’s $125 million satire, opened October 2 with Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon whose Arctic drilling sets off a planetary catastrophe. In UnHerd, the film historian David Thomson, author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls it a flawed masterpiece and does not flinch from the flaws. The fable is “striking yet shallow.” Supporting characters are “introduced but not adequately explored.” Cruise, he writes, “is so terrified of being boring he cannot stoop to stillness or quiet.”
And yet. Thomson sees Cruise’s paunchy, manic Digger as a portrait of an age in which “the idiotic has become axiomatic,” a domineering, foolish authority convinced that power justifies whatever it wants. Beneath the performance is a look he finds more frightening than any horror film: “A look of gray ice pervades the movie; primary colors have been eliminated.” “There is no human touch any longer.”
A film about the end of the world, in other words, that looks the way the end of the world would look.
Most American critics saw a different movie. At RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels writes that “Digger chokes on its own ambitions, and very few of the picture’s participants emerge still breathing.” The film, he argues, never commits to its own high concept, and its dialogue preaches: “Every line explicitly explains the vapid evil espoused by craven industrialists against our fragile environment.”
William Bibbiani of TheWrap goes after the politics. A satire of billionaires that never threatens one is just flattery for the audience: “We are powerless to stop them, but we do get to point and giggle.” Of Cruise: he “hasn’t done this much caps-locked ‘ACTING’ in many years.”
On this reading, Digger is the thing it mocks: an expensive spectacle of the apocalypse that lets everyone go home feeling superior to it.
Read closely and the critics agree on every fact. The script is thin. Cruise is loud. The satire draws no blood. The look is extraordinary. The quarrel is over what a film is for. Daniels and Bibbiani grade Digger as an argument, and as an argument it fails: nobody leaves the theater changed about oil or billionaires. Thomson grades it as an artifact, something a future might dig up to learn what we looked like, and as an artifact it may be priceless.
Thomson’s tell is his title. He calls it the masterpiece “we deserve.” A culture that can only process its own ending as a $125 million entertainment starring Tom Cruise has made a film that is exactly that, and the film’s inability to be anything better is the most honest thing in it. The critics who wanted it to be smarter were asking the mirror to improve the face.
So: not a masterpiece, by the ordinary standard that a masterpiece knows what it is doing. But Thomson has the longer view, and he may be right that films of this scale and this nerve are ending. If so, Digger is less the last great film than the last great gesture, a studio spending a fortune to make a picture of the world with no human touch left in it. That is worth seeing, if only once.
Can a work of art about our stupidity be anything other than stupid, and would we recognize it if it were?
Read the originals: David Thomson, “Digger: the flawed masterpiece we deserve,” UnHerd, Oct. 2 · Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com, Sept. 29 · William Bibbiani, TheWrap, Sept. 29.
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