| Worth seeing: |
| Director: | Alejandro González Iñárritu |
| Featuring: | Tom Cruise, Burn Gorman, Danny Kirrane, Emma D'Arcy, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Mercedes Hernández, Michael Stuhlbarg, Pip Torrens, Riz Ahmed, Robert John Burke, Sandra Hüller, Tom Bell |
| Length: | 129 minutes |
| Certificate: | 15 |
| Country: | Mexico, UK, US |
| Released: | 2nd October 2026 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is an aging oil tycoon, whose latest project has just exploded in the Arctic, sending a massive iceberg hurtling towards the Scandinavian coast, threatening the lives of millions of people.
A top-level meeting is convened – including President Compson (John Goodman) and his top general Fitzgerald (Robert John Burke) – to decide how best to deal with the crisis. Fitzgerald’s preference, bombing the iceberg to pieces, doesn’t go down well with Digger’s environmental adviser, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed).
Digger and his team set off to replace engineering with diplomacy as they try – not altogether successfully – to talk round world leaders to his point of view.
More than anything, his view is “If we can’t control the course of nature, at least we can control the narrative.”
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
When the publicists have to ask reviewers not to include any spoilers, alarm bells ring.
Reviewers know not to include any spoilers, so what are they REALLY asking?
In this case, without – obviously – disclosing what happens, a point comes, midway through Digger, when the film changes entirely. It becomes a completely different film, leaving you wondering why you invested in the original set of characters and contemplating what you’re meant to think about all of this now.
This is obviously Alejandro González Iñárritu’s intention, but you have to wonder why.
The original film, as described above – and as appears in the trailer – had its merits; a satire on obscene wealth, power, environmentalism, consumerism and the hypocrisy of those who clamour for an end to fossil fuels while demonstrating an over-reliance on oil – told through a ruthless – but cat-loving – Tom Cruise, hidden under hours of prosthetics, hair and make-up. In fact, he’s so unrecognisable that you wonder why on earth they didn’t just hire an older, fatter actor or make the character younger and fitter – or maybe this mismatch plays into the big “twist.”
Either way, the initial narrative has a lot going for it but the twist undoes all the good work. Suddenly, we don’t know whether we care about anything we’ve been watching and we’re not drawn back on side until a final, shocking scene that’s almost so powerful that we forgive them for what we’ve just sat through. Almost.
The performances – notably from Cruise, Riz Ahmed and John Goodman – hit the mark and as you’d expect from a film-maker of his calibre, Iñárritu has something to say. He just confuses things by trying to be too clever and drops the ball, coming across pretentious rather than enlightening.
And once you make a mistake, everyone knows you should stop digging. Well, most people know. Digger keep digging.