When the man who helped break the world insists he can save it, the promise sounds suspiciously like another sales pitch. Alejandro G. Iñárritu makes that contradiction the engine of Digger, a loud, anxious black comedy that gives Tom Cruise a rare chance to play a figure who cannot outrun the consequences of his own power.
Digger’s most revealing move is to turn a global emergency into a fight over who gets to tell the story.
Movie at a Glance
- UK cinemas: 2 October 2026, including IMAX screenings
- US cinemas: 2 October 2026, including IMAX screenings
- Runtime: 129 minutes
- UK classification: 15
- US rating: R for pervasive language
- Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
- Screenplay: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman
- Starring: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons
- Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Viewer Match
- Best for: viewers drawn to unruly political satire, outsized performances and adventurous studio filmmaking.
- Maybe skip if: you prefer restrained comedy or a simple disaster thriller.
- Mood and pace: feverish, caustic and deliberately exhausting in places.
- Cinema or streaming? The VistaVision photography and dense production design favour a cinema screen.
- Spoiler level: This review keeps the film’s turns under wraps.
Cruise trades control for chaos
Cruise’s Digger Rockwell is an oil magnate whose confidence has hardened into a private language: every warning can be reframed, every setback sold as a victory. The prosthetics and swagger make him instantly larger than life, but the more interesting performance lies in the strain beneath the performance he gives the world. Cruise lets the character’s need to command the room compete with flashes of fear and fragility. It is a worthwhile departure from the precision and physical assurance that usually define his screen persona.
Around him, Riz Ahmed brings a human scale to the escalating crisis. His worried restraint gives Digger’s bluster something tangible to push against, while John Goodman meets the film’s political grotesquerie at full volume. The ensemble is formidable, although Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemons have less room to develop than their casting promises. That imbalance matters in a film already crowded with ideas: the supporting players sometimes become positions in an argument before they can become people.
A spectacle built to make power look absurd
Iñárritu has little interest in a modest warning. His film pushes political comedy, ecological dread and show-business self-awareness into the same unstable frame. The central question is sharp: when powerful people cause a catastrophe, how much energy will they spend controlling its narrative instead of confronting its cost? The screenplay can be too insistent about its answer, and the comic rhythm occasionally gives way to sheer noise. Yet the excess also feels inseparable from a story about people who mistake spectacle for action.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s VistaVision images give that excess scale and unease. The wide compositions and distorted perspectives make Digger’s world feel both extravagantly built and perilously artificial. Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson’s production design turns wealth into a visual argument of its own, while Cosmo Sheldrake’s score presses the film towards a kind of uneasy carnival. The editing keeps the many registers colliding; it cannot always make those collisions graceful, but the film’s ambition remains difficult to ignore.
Where the joke stops landing
The risk in a satire this broad is that its targets become obvious before its characters become complicated. Digger is strongest when it finds a frightened person inside the public pose, or lets an image carry more weight than another shouted line. It is weaker when it repeats the same accusation at higher volume. At 129 minutes, that unevenness becomes part of the viewing experience: moments of genuine surprise sit beside stretches that feel overplayed.
Even so, a major studio release this strange and confrontational is worth taking seriously. Cruise commits to a deeply unflattering role, and Iñárritu builds a film whose visual nerve outlasts some of its verbal bluntness. It is a messy, divisive work, but its argument about power and self-deception has enough force to linger after the noise subsides.
Spoiler-Free Verdict
- Performances: 8/10
- Direction: 8/10
- Screenplay: 6.5/10
- Score: 7/10
- Cinematography: 9/10
- Entertainment Value: 7/10
- Overall: 7.5/10
Star rating: 3.5/5
Verdict badge: One for Fans
Verdict: An unruly, visually audacious climate satire powered by Cruise’s fearless turn, even when its argument grows louder than its jokes.
Watch the Official Trailer
The official trailer introduces Digger Rockwell and the crisis he wants to turn into his redemption story.
Did Digger work for you? Share your spoiler-free take below.