Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Robert Jonathan Burke, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman, Sophie Wilde
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
In Irish Cinemas: 2nd October 2026
Alejandro González Iñárritu has always been drawn to excess. His films can feel like elaborate demonstrations of what cinema is capable of, and when the spectacle connects with the human story, that excess can be exhilarating. In Birdman, the illusion of a continuous shot becomes an extension of its protagonist’s psychological confinement; in The Revenant, the punishing physicality makes survival itself feel almost unbearable. But Digger represents the less successful side of Iñárritu’s maximalism. It is crammed with ideas, elaborate set-pieces and structural games, yet underneath all the machinery there is surprisingly little to hold onto.
The film wastes no time easing us into its world. Tom Cruise plays the titular oil magnate, hidden beneath an extraordinary amount of prosthetic makeup, whose morning takes an abrupt turn when catastrophe strikes one of his Arctic operations. An oil disaster sets an enormous iceberg called Judy drifting towards Scandinavia, while the American president demands answers and the possibility of global catastrophe rapidly becomes reality. Iñárritu throws one crisis after another at the screen, rarely allowing the audience a moment to catch its breath.
The problem is that velocity isn’t the same thing as momentum. For all the noise and movement, there is little emotional traction. Digger himself is deliberately outsized: a swaggering, self-important tycoon who seems almost too ridiculous to inhabit the same world as the supposedly apocalyptic events surrounding him. The impressive supporting ensemble including Sandra Hüller, John Goodman and Jesse Plemons are given similarly broad character sketches rather than people to inhabit.
Riz Ahmed fares better as a scientist caught between professional responsibility and personal doubt, bringing a degree of vulnerability to an otherwise relentlessly heightened film.
Iñárritu eventually introduces a conceptual turn designed to reframe what we’ve been watching. It is an intriguing idea, but it feels less like a revelation than another layer of the director’s ongoing conversation with his own filmmaking persona. The film repeatedly draws attention to its construction, its themes and its cleverness, sometimes at the expense of the people supposedly driving the story.
That becomes particularly apparent in its environmental argument. Digger is clearly concerned with humanity’s destructive relationship with the planet, and with our tendency to search for individual villains when responsibility is more widely shared. But instead of allowing those ideas to emerge organically from the characters and events, the film frequently spells them out through lengthy, emphatic speeches. For something ostensibly interested in human complexity, it can be strangely uninterested in observing human beings.
There is plenty here to admire on a purely cinematic level. Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography gives the film an imposing, almost monumental scale, while Dennis Gassner’s production design creates the kind of meticulously controlled environments in which Iñárritu’s visual ambitions can flourish. And Cruise commits completely to the ridiculousness of Digger, proving once again that his screen presence extends well beyond conventional movie-star charisma. He attacks the role with exactly the kind of reckless conviction it requires.
The trouble is that the film’s ambition continually outruns its substance. Digger is bold, elaborate and technically extraordinary, but its ingenuity rarely translates into genuine feeling. It reaches for something enormous and complicated, only to leave the impression of a filmmaker dazzled by the size of his own creation.
Overall: 7/10
Movie Reviewer
