Even Tom Cruise can’t make a politically correct climate satire funny

And the crowd hates it

The only reviewers with anything good to say about the new movie Digger, are ‘surprise’ the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and the BBC. “Digger might just be the year’s best film — if you trust the process”, says the ABC cryptically. But over at lefty headquarters, the New York Times headlines it with “Even Tom Cruise can’t save this strained satire”. It’s that bad.

Tom Cruise plays an ugly old white oil tycoon who’s team cracks a glacier in half in Greenland. According to the BBC this is the moment “reality hits when an iceberg the size of a small country splits from the glacier and starts drifting towards northern Europe. In a matter of days, a tsunami will put several major cities under water.” Righto. So they spent $180 million, but didn’t waste a cent paying any scientists to help with the script? Floating ice doesn’t raise sea levels much when it melts.

The BBC reviewer, Nicholas Barber, goes on to say that a scientist (a character in the movie) helps to convince them on a plan to use the military “to change the iceberg’s direction”. I keep waiting for Barber to explain why this was not the strong point of the script but he says: “What’s fascinating about the scenario is that it would have seemed embarrassingly over-the-top a few years ago, but now seems as plausible as a documentary. ” (Only if you work at the BBC, eh?)

Other reactions

The Wikipedia page describes the other reviewers reactions:

Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com gave the film 2 out of 4 stars, stating that “it’s excruciatingly painful that this languid, self-satisfied film doesn’t work”. Bilge Ebiri of Vulture described Digger as “a torturous experience, sometimes purposefully so, often unintentionally so.” Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film 2 out of 5 stars, declaring it “an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances”.

The problem with politically correct satire is there is nothing funny to say. A comedian has to be a step ahead of the audience but if they’ve already beaten you over the head with the message for thirty years, there are no surprises left. They can’t find any hidden truth-gems to share because every bit of ground has been reworked and sieved with a teaspoon and even the worms they found have been turned into 6 part marketing schemes.

As Luke Buckmaster says “Digger is the batshit climate satire nobody expected from Tom Cruise”.

Weird movies

The movie is directed by a Mexican Alejandro G Iñárritu, known for making weird movies.

Nikki Gemmel in The Australian was scathing:

Tom Cruise delivers an exhausting misfire in new satire Digger

Digger is a Dr. Strangelove wannabe. But whereas the 1964 stunner was compelling, this one is repelling. A messy, unpleasant, sub-Kubrickian misfire. You can almost feel the panic in the writing room leaking onto the screen; Warner Bros might also be panicking at this point.

Digger is the ugliest film of the year, deliberately so, but the relentless obnoxiousness is exhausting. There’s the ball grabbing, bombastic ugliness of Tom Cruise’s Texan billionaire.

It’s an excoriating takedown of the blinkered greed of US capitalism; America as seen through the eyes of a hostile observer. Only a non-American would make it. Inarritu insists that Digger is a comedy but the satire for the most part is ­laboured, grating and relentlessly unfunny; humour does not come naturally to the filmmaker behind Amores Perros and The Revenant. We get thermometers sniffed after feline rectal examinations. Vomiting. Pissing. Burping. Extreme, chin-saturated closeups. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

I Wanted to Love Digger, But It’s a Total Mess

By Josh Rosenberg, Esquire

Digger should be a fun character. People should dress as Digger for Halloween, and “Fuck the polar bears” should be printed on T-shirts. Instead, Digger feels like Captain Obvious. And no one likes Captain Obvious. So what could have possibly led Cruise to join such a groan-inducing film?

The real reason I don’t have the answers to my questions is because Digger barely asks them. When the credits roll, the idea that you’ve reconsidered anything about the state of the world for the first time feels impossible. You would have had to have literally been born out of Digger Rockwell’s oil spill and crawled to the theatre to watch your first-ever movie for Digger to feel meaningful.

But maybe this is just Cruise hunting for a path toward his first Oscar, like when DiCaprio fought bears in Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Or is it possible that Cruise, at age 64, resonates with Digger’s message that his generation has left us utterly without hope for a liveable future? That there was no point in risking his life over eight Mission: Impossible films if there aren’t any more generations to enjoy them?

Satire of a satire

So after everyone in the ABC, BBC, CBC, Hollywood and the Greens have seen it, presumably the ticket sales will dry up. People will look back and wonder if it was an accidental satire of a satire —where the millionaire actor was used to mock a billionaire oil tycoon, and the science movement based on junk science spawned a movie based on virtually no science at all.

The movie “Digger” is playing this weekend and is expected to take in a very low $12 million, potentially becoming the Box office bomb of 2026.  But, you never know, Tom Cruise might get an Oscar because the Hollywood crowd that vote for the Oscars are the 2% this movie is aimed at.