Digger Review: Iñárritu & Cruise's Terrific Satire Is White-Hot Cinematic Rage

Digger pulls a clever feint with its approach to broad comedy and social satire, giving way to a crafty, furious statement about the modern world.

Published Sep 29, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Brandon Zachary is a Lead Writer for Screen Rant's New Movie Team. He also writes or has written for Comicbook.com, CBR, That Hashtag Show, Just Watch, and TVBrittanyF. Brandon is an Emerging Screenwriters Semi-Finalist, co-writer of a Screencraft Quarter-Finalist, a seasoned on-screen interviewer, and a MASSIVE nerd. You can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com

Digger is a bold swing from Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise that works best when it's able to show its true colors. Initially portraying itself as something of an ecological answer to Dr. Strangelove, Digger eventually reveals a secondary layer to its critique that makes everything before and after all the more impactful.

It's an often heady, purposefully contradictory movie that tries to strike the proper balance between broad comedy and cutting satire, with an undercurrent of analysis on the role artists play in preserving culture and history. It does all of this while also being an unabashedly confrontational movie about the dangers of climate change and the impact that our society has had on the planet.

At times, it all risks becoming too much. However, the committed cast, strong production design, and whip-smart script make it all come together to be one of the most engaging and complex comedies of the year. It's a tour-de-force showing from the cast, a marvelous technical achievement from the crew, and a great addition to Iñárritu's filmography.

To Really Get What Digger Is About, You Have To Drill Down

Digger is a tricky film to talk about, thanks largely to a solid twist toward the end of the first act that recontextualizes the plot without undercutting the comedic tension within it. The film focuses largely on the titular oil man (Cruise), a massively wealthy industrialist who has been ignoring or hiding the potential ecological damage that his company has been causing. Their most recent expansion into Greenland has backfired spectacularly, causing an explosion that sends a massive iceberg into the ocean that will cause unprecedented damage around the world. Despite the increasingly desperate and furious arguments from Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger is able to convince people like President Compson (John Goodman) and his allies to double down on their predicament.

Cruise is electric in Digger, commanding the room with showy flashes of over-the-top hubris while also finding little moments of humanity...

This first act plays like a broad comedy, with plenty of slamming doors, jokey routines, and showy performances. It's not bad, even earning some solid, surface-level gags, but it lacks the bite that the premise is calling for. This is soon upended with a hilarious reveal, however, which steadily reveals more about the very broad nature of the story and why it's being told that way. It's an effective turn; less of an earth-shattering change than a crucial tweak to the story. It justifies the characters' broadness in a way that makes sense, while also opening up room for the cast to find new layers to their performances.

While this is largely for comedic effect, it's crucial to what Tom Cruise is doing in the film. Cruise is electric in Digger, commanding the room with showy flashes of over-the-top hubris while also finding little moments of humanity once the reveal comes into play. It's a terrific performance that highlights the versatility he rarely gets to show off in big-budget action movies, ranging from hilarious to unexpectedly quiet and resolutely defiant. It comes together in a way only Cruise could make work.

Digger Works Because Of Pitch-Perfect Execution

The biggest problem with Digger might just be that bold ambition. There are a lot of thematic ideas at play here, even before the big shift. A lesser movie might have buckled under the pressure, with too many concepts bouncing off one another and distracting from the underlying throughline.

Instead, this film benefits immensely from a fully committed cast and crew, all coming together behind Iñárritu's direction and the screenplay to deliver something masterful. While the supporting actors don't get the kind of depth to play with that Cruise does – Sandra Hüller does great work with a surprisingly minor part – they each make the most of what they have. Sophie Wilde, in particular, gets moments of going head-to-head with Cruise that are impossible to discuss without spoilers, but speak to some of the movie's best qualities. The same goes for Jesse Plemons, whose understated turn as Kenny might be one of the film's greatest weapons (and should earn the actor some well-deserved awards recognition).

Digger is an angry movie from top to bottom.

The production design is layered in ways that feel seamless at first, and then hilariously specific later, but never distracts the audience from the film's central focus. Digger is an angry movie from top to bottom. The full scope of that fury extends far beyond the surface-level comedy that makes up most of the movie's outer layers.

While the dozens of spinning plates don't always come together, and it purposefully makes itself hard to love at times, Digger's pitch-perfect balance of pointed satire and broad comedy makes for a terrific film. It speaks to the current world and its politics, all while delivering a timeless retrospection on the responsibility of art and the harrowing realities of a changing world.

Digger releases in theaters nationwide on Friday, October 2.

Digger

8/10

Cast

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  Digger Rockwell

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  Ganesh