"Digger" feels like what "Birdman" director Alejandro González Iñárritu would do with a combination of "Dr. Strangelove" style and "Don't Look Up" substance.
Struggling at the box office, it's indeed a critically polarizing film and somewhat challenging to sit through, but I found it ultimately rewarding. It is a high-concept approach to dramatizing climate disasters - a catastrophic problem with which humanity must reckon in the mid-21st century. What will fine art, cinema, and theater do to reckon with the destruction of the planet at the hands of fossil fuel companies and a global economy beholden to dirty energy?
This film stridently hits audiences over the head - as Tom Cruise wielding a shovel - with an answer to that question: using inventive, over-the-top satire as a blunt instrument. I suspect this cantankerous romp of a movie will find an appreciative audience in the long run... even if in the long run, we're all dead.
