Look, I’m just going to say it – Digger is the movie everyone’s decided to hate before they’ve actually sat through it, and that’s exactly why it matters. The $300 million Iñárritu climate epic with Tom Cruise in cowboy boots has been savaged by critics, bombed at the box office, and become this year’s favorite punching bag. And yeah, I get it. The trailers made it look like a heavy-handed satire about an oil baron causing an apocalyptic iceberg disaster, complete with a scenery-chewing John Goodman as a Trump-ish president. Subtle, right?

But here’s the thing – the movie everyone’s reviewing isn’t actually the movie Iñárritu made. And I’m not being cute here.

The Twist Nobody Stuck Around For

So here’s what actually happens in Digger, and why the walkouts started way before people figured out what they were watching. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who’s basically every liberal’s nightmare vision of Texas money – all antlers and polar bear rugs and boots that probably cost more than my car. His drilling platform breaks loose a massive iceberg, methane starts leaking everywhere, and he’s got to tell President Goodman that Europe’s about to have a very bad day.

The first 45 minutes play exactly like the ham-fisted climate parable you’d expect. It’s almost painful how broad it is. Cruise is doing this weird accent. Goodman’s ranting about “liberal scientists” and “fake ice.” The dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who’s never actually met a conservative but has read a lot of angry tweets about them.

And then Iñárritu pulls the rug out.

The camera pulls back. We’re suddenly watching a stage. The whole thing – the oil rig, the iceberg, all of it – is a play being performed inside the actual movie. And the audience watching this play? They’re a bunch of coastal elites at some kind of charity gala, and they’re eating it up. Laughing at all the right moments. Feeling properly superior about those dumb oil barons and corrupt politicians.

Who Gets to Be the Villain?

This is where Digger stops being the movie people thought they bought tickets for and becomes something way more uncomfortable. Because Iñárritu spends the rest of the film with this gala audience – and they’re us. Or at least, they’re the “us” who goes to movies about climate change and feels good about recognizing the bad guys.

The real protagonist (if you can even call her that) is played by an actress I won’t spoil, but she’s sitting in this audience watching the play, and she’s a venture capitalist who just made a fortune investing in “green” cryptocurrency mining operations that use more energy than a small country. Her date for the evening? A tech CEO whose company’s AI servers are cooled by water diverted from drought-stricken communities. Another couple at their table runs a carbon offset scheme that’s basically just financial engineering.

And they’re all applauding this simplistic play about evil oil men because it lets them off the hook entirely.

I mean, here’s what Iñárritu’s actually asking: Why are we so obsessed with making cartoon villains out of people in cowboy boots when the real machinery of climate disaster looks a lot more like us? The people in Teslas, the ones with solar panels and Patagonia vests, the ones who think we’re the good guys because we correctly identify that fossil fuels are bad. Projects like a solar farm on the side of a dam show why real climate action depends on infrastructure rather than easy cartoon villains.

It’s Not Subtle, But Maybe It Shouldn’t Be

Not gonna lie, parts of this movie are a slog. It’s self-indulgent in that specific Iñárritu way – long takes of people looking meaningful, a score that won’t quit reminding you this is IMPORTANT. The play-within-the-movie runs too long on purpose, which I get conceptually but also kind of wanted to end.

But I keep thinking about this one scene. The venture capitalist character steps out to take a call about her crypto mining investment. She’s literally standing outside the theater, half-listening to the play through the doors, and she’s on the phone calculating returns while inside they’re watching fake glaciers melt. The cognitive dissonance is just… it’s right there. We all do this. We know what’s happening and we find ways to participate in it anyway because the alternative is too hard or too expensive or too inconvenient.

“The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what kind of characters we’re the most comfortable making into climate villains.”

Why Everyone Wants This Movie to Fail

The critical pile-on makes sense to me now, actually. It’s not really about whether Digger is good or bad as cinema (it’s both, honestly – brilliant and annoying in roughly equal measure). It’s that nobody wants to be told they’re complicit. We want our climate movies to have clear villains we can point at. Oil executives. Corrupt politicians. Anyone but the people who think they’re helping.

The film’s basic argument – that capitalism has figured out how to monetize even our resistance to climate disaster, and that’s way scarier than a guy in cowboy boots – isn’t exactly new. But watching it play out for two and a half hours, seeing these gala attendees congratulate themselves while being just as much a part of the problem… yeah, I squirmed. I think you’re supposed to.

Critics are calling it “preachy” and “self-satisfied,” which is kind of hilarious because those are exactly the qualities Iñárritu’s satirizing. The play-within-the-movie is preachy and self-satisfied on purpose. It’s what we want climate art to be – simple, righteous, targeted at people we already disagree with.

What This Actually Means

Here’s my thing. Is Digger a great movie? Probably not. Is it too long and too pleased with its own cleverness? Absolutely. Did I kind of hate-watch parts of it? Yeah.

But it’s asking a question that most climate change movies are terrified to touch: What if the problem isn’t just the obvious bad guys? What if it’s also the system that lets all of us – even the ones recycling and buying electric cars and sharing articles about sustainability – profit from the same machine grinding the planet down?

The movie ends with the gala audience giving the play a standing ovation. They’ve learned nothing. They feel better about themselves. They go home to their lives that are fundamentally built on the same extraction and consumption, just with better branding. And Iñárritu just… lets that sit there. No resolution. No hope spot. Just complicity all the way down.

Maybe that’s why everyone’s so eager to dismiss this thing. It’s easier to say the movie’s bad than to sit with what it’s actually showing us about ourselves. I don’t know. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, which is more than I can say for most of the stuff I’ve watched this year.