Moments to enjoy … Tom Cruise (Digger Rockwell) in Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy View image in fullscreen Moments to enjoy … Tom Cruise (Digger Rockwell) in Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Film Review Digger review – Tom Cruise’s loudmouth oil tycoon goes hard in Alejandro G Iñárritu’s eco-satire One man’s irresponsible drilling causes a global crisis in Iñárritu’s exasperatingly laborious, self-congratulatory film
Peter Bradshaw Tue 29 Sep 2026 18.00 CEST Last modified on Tue 29 Sep 2026 18.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google A new movie from the Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is always an event. So it’s disconcerting to discover that the event in question is the most disappointing film of the year: an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances. There are moments to enjoy in Tom Cruise’s boisterous leading turn, yes, but the film’s value resides chiefly in some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen, conjured by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner.
An ageing, paunchy Texan oil tycoon called “Digger” Rockwell is seen fretfully getting up in the morning, cooing over his horrible old incontinent cat, taking urgent messages from underlings about a certain situation developing in his drilling station in the frozen Arctic. He is played by Tom Cruise with a wispy baldingness and various other prostheses, together with a good-ol’-boy twang and a Stetson borrowed from Slim Pickens’s bomb-riding army major in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His prized possession is the battered old shovel his granddaddy used a century before, digging for black gold as a penniless young man in the lone star state. Digger likes to brandish this to make a point.
Digger’s – and the world’s – troubles come to a head when he is informed by his cringingly polite, querulous and terrified chief scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) that the company’s irresponsible drilling practices, of which Ganesh has been warning Digger for quite some time, have caused a crisis: a vast ice floe, many times the size of Manhattan island, has broken away from the Arctic landmass and is now moving quickly towards the coast of Norway. Its imminent landfall is going to be like a nuclear attack.
Aggressively unrepentant to the very end, Digger gets himself invited to the White House’s crisis meeting, chaired by the gaunt and unwell President Compson, crankily played by John Goodman , with various military top brass and besuited politicians, including the vice-president, a very bland role on which Michael Stuhlbarg is wasted. Digger effectively takes over as de facto C-in-C, lambasting the president’s pusillanimous reluctance to take responsibility for a situation that his political subsidies and permissions have created. Meanwhile, back at Digger’s residence, Sandra Hüller has next to nothing to do as his half-sister, a role whose substance may well have been abandoned in the edit.
View image in fullscreen Cranky … John Goodman as President Compson in Digger. Photograph: Warner Bros Entertainment Inc/PA But wait. The film’s shrill, scratchy characterisations are partly explained by a sudden, unexpected plot development, yet this only creates a second narrative strand in which t…