Should you see a Looney Tunes–esque satire that stars Tom Cruise in prosthetics portraying a loud caricature of an American oilman, that’s currently on track to be one of the biggest box-office failures of all time?
Absolutely yes—and it’s a movie that rewired my expectations of what a movie about climate change should be. Digger, the critically panned, exorbitantly expensive new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, calls into question the purpose of art and even the basic purpose of telling the truth in the face of a capitalist machine churning the world toward climate disaster. The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what kind of characters we’re the most comfortable making into climate villains.
(Spoilers ahead—if you have any plans to see the movie, I really would encourage you to do so first before reading on.)
The film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who only wears cowboy boots and lives in a mansion covered in antlers and polar bear skin rugs. At the start of the film, one of Digger’s oil-drilling platforms accidentally causes a massive iceberg to break loose, resulting in a huge methane leak. With catastrophe impending, he has to alert the president (John Goodman, putting in a performance reminiscent of his best work with the Coen brothers) as the iceberg barrels toward Europe.
The trailers play up the movie as a too-broad-it’s-painful satire of American oilmen and how a Trumpian-inspired religious-right administration would respond to a real climate disaster. Iñárritu, however, lets us in on the secret early: The farce we’re watching is actually a play within the movie, being performed in a theater with a leaky ceiling that keeps losing power. Tom Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather an actor playing Digger Rockwell.
We eventually learn that the play, Fossil Fools, depicts events that actually happened some decades ago. From then on, you’re aware that every joke, every villainous portrayal of Digger and the president as Really Bad Guys, is for two audiences: moviegoers in 2026 and theatergoers living in a dystopian future.
From the trailers, I’d initially thought that the movie was going to be similar to Adam McKay’s blockbuster Don’t Look Up, a climate satire that drew record numbers of viewers on Netflix when it aired in 2021. Don’t Look Up puts scientists racing to inform the public about an impending asteroid collision and pushing to avert catastrophe against corporate and political interests that have other plans. McKay, at the time, said the film’s purpose was to make “people less tolerant of inaction from their leaders.” If the media—journalists, filmmakers, and the like—could correctly inform the public about the risks of climate change, the film (and its accompanying calls to action) posited, we would begin to see progress on cutting emissions.
Digger, similarly, deals with themes around climate misinformation. Digger admits he ignored alerts from his own company about the unfolding crisis on his drilling platforms. Goodman’s president and his cabinet decide to deploy a “firewall” that censors out all mentions of the climate crisis (including the phrase “Al Gore”) to control the narrative of what’s happening.
