The first Digger reactions split critics in half — and both halves describe the same Tom Cruise film. So what is it actually about?
Warner Bros. lifted the embargo on Digger this week and the verdicts came back at war with each other. The fight is narrower than it looks: the people who loved Tom Cruise’s new picture and the people who hated it agree on nearly every fact about it.
The film screened for press in New York and Los Angeles over the past few days, the London premiere ran the same evening, and the embargo lifted on Tuesday afternoon Pacific time. Variety and IndieWire rounded up the first posts within minutes of each other, and neither found a consensus to report.
What they are arguing about: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon insulated from the world he is wrecking. Drilling in Greenland releases a mass of methane and dislodges an ice shelf that starts moving toward Europe with the potential to trigger a tsunami. Iñárritu wrote it with his Birdman collaborators Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone plus Sabina Berman; Emmanuel Lubezki shot it, Dennis Gassner designed it.
- Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, the scientist with the bad news
- Sandra Hüller as Digger’s half-sister and partner
- John Goodman as a US president in cancer treatment
- Michael Stuhlbarg as the vice president; Jesse Plemons as a figure who surfaces late
Where the reactions actually agree
Three things repeat in both columns, the enthusiastic and the dismissive. The film is not what its marketing suggests. The satire is not funny — the positive posts say so as readily as the negative ones. And at some point the picture stops being the broad comedy it opens as and becomes something else, a turn several writers describe without describing, because they are avoiding spoilers.
Variety’s awards columnist Clayton Davis: the divide on this one is going to be wide.
The disagreement sits entirely on that turn. To IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill it produces Cruise’s best performance since Magnolia and one of the most unpredictable studio films ever made. To Awards Radar’s Joey Magidson the same film is a mess in which not much works. Ryan Lattanzio, who wrote IndieWire’s own round-up, called it a self-indulgent miscalculation. David Ehrlich compared watching Iñárritu build a joke to watching Frank Gehry draw a straight line. Edward Douglas, who did not like it, still allowed that a late reveal almost justifies the rest.
The number the split runs into
Digger is not a festival title. IndieWire puts the budget at $125 million, with sources suggesting higher, and quotes an insider saying the film needs north of $300 million worldwide to break even once marketing and the awards campaign are counted. Warner Bros. is opening it wide on 2 October, in IMAX and VistaVision in selected theatres. Variety lists 1 October; the international posters carry that date, the American ones the second.
IndieWire’s Anne Thompson called it a brave and gorgeous art film that will not score with mainstream audiences.
Thompson liked it. Edward Douglas did not, and predicted a horrendous CinemaScore — the grade paying audiences hand out on opening night, A+ to F. Warner Bros. is putting a picture its own supporters call an art film onto IMAX and VistaVision screens.
For Cruise the stakes are narrower and older. He is 64, has four acting nominations and no competitive Oscar, and took an honorary Academy Award last year. Digger is his first non-action lead in roughly a decade — the only other since 2015 is the 2017 crime comedy American Made. He plays it under prosthetics that took six hours to apply at the start of the shoot; he told the New Heights podcast he put a stopwatch on the makeup department until the process came in under an hour.
Digger opens in ten days. Warner Bros. is running it as one of its two fall awards titles alongside Dune: Part Three, and the trailers have been selling the oil-baron comedy rather than whatever the film turns into. The first CinemaScore arrives the night it opens.
