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The Current Debate connects the dots around a topic of the critical conversation.Digger (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2026).Speaking to The New York Times a few days before Digger (2026) hit theaters, Alejandro G. Iñárritu said that the script of his eighth feature was originally called Blah, Blah, Blah. “The film was conceptually about the most dangerous weapon that we human beings have,” he told Melena Ryzik: “This little organ that is called the tongue.” Sure enough, people talk plenty in Digger, often at unhealthy decibels, and none more than the man at the heart—or the place where the heart should be—of this sprawling, verbose satire. To see Tom Cruise star in something other than the action-powered franchises he’d become synonymous with since the turn of the millennium was always Digger’s biggest selling point. And who better than Iñárritu to coax the megastar out of his IP torpor? The director and actor “were made for each other, if no one else,” David Ehrlich writes at IndieWire. “One is a cinematic daredevil whose films are fueled by the tension between ego and mortality—a mad virtuoso obsessed with staging elaborate stunts that externalize his inner being into the stuff of outsized spectacle, and do so with a kamikaze effortfulness so extreme that even (or especially) their most grandiose work can make it seem like the person behind them is hiding from reality instead of rendering it larger than life. The other is Tom Cruise.” The actor’s latest creation is Digger Rockwell, a multi-billionaire oil tycoon from Texas whose family first hit black gold in 1917, and has since amassed a fortune so obscenely large that he’s become immune to the consequences of his actions. Or so he thinks. It is early into the film when life inside Digger’s Xanadu—an opulent mansion production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson imagine as a graveyard of furs and hunting trophies—is upended by news of an imminent catastrophe. One of the plutocrat’s companies, drilling deep into Greenland’s ice cap despite repeated warnings not to, has triggered a methane explosion of biblical magnitude. Not only did the blast wipe out dozens of people; it’s also set a rogue iceberg five times the size of Washington, D. C. on a collision course with northern Europe—an impending humanitarian disaster projected to kill and displace millions and result in more than eighteen trillion dollars in property damage. It is a measure of Digger’s astonishing wealth and power that the president of the United States (John Goodman) ferries his entire court to the oligarch’s estate to figure out an exit strategy, a loud brainstorming session which also features input from Digger’s environmental advisor (Riz Ahmed) and the meek vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg). There’s talk of nuking the floating threat and/or praying it away; when that fails and news of the looming Armageddon becomes public, Digger is made to confront an assembly hall packed with European leaders fretting over the disaster, and bloviates—for almost ten minutes—about the paradox between our revulsion for resource-hoovering magnates like him and our dependence on the comforts their environmentally pernicious practices allow. Saddled with a fat suit, a receding hairline, and enough old-guy makeup as to make him all but unrecognizable, Cruise doesn’t simply monologue—he struts and crows and shouts, as a cacophonous blend of the incel guru he played in Magnolia (1999) and Len Grossman, his foul-mouthed studio boss from Tropic Thunder (2008). Digger (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2026).It’s not just his turn that feels over the top; Digger itself is pitched as a messy, maximalist, unnervingly loud farce. There’s no denying “the gargantuan scale of [Cruise’s] performance, the conviction of the script’s grim environmental message, and Iñárritu’s antic style,” per Nicholas Barber at the BBC. But Digger’s excesses, in the end, prove more numbing than electrifying. “From the pointedly artificial sets, to the off-putting sound design (one scene is constantly punctuated with the ear-splitting clang! of characters tripping over an offscreen metal shovel), to the frantic performances, the whole film feels designed to aggravate,” Bilge Ebiri notes at Vulture. “Everything is an underline, every line a shout, every glance a grimace. It’s all expectoration, no breath.” Just as worrying for a comedy that strains to double as a modern take on Dr. Strangelove (1964), the film never quite strikes the right rhythm or wit. “Despite the popping eyeballs, swiveling heads, flapping jaws and a few scenes that Iñárritu has tried to direct in a cutesy Wes Anderson-esque key, the results are largely mirthless,” Manohla Dargis contends at The New York Times. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki on VistaVision and in fifty shades of gray, a wintry palette that occasionally evokes the same desaturated aesthetic of Swedish director Roy Andersson, Digger is about as cold and sterile as the man’s own mausoleum. As seen by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, the film “borrows the doomsday architecture of Strangelove but leaves out the slyness, replacing it with a lavishly overscaled spectacle of browbeating.”Then again, Iñárritu might reply, that was always the point. As it turns out, the unruly disaster movie Digger begins as what is in fact a tech rehearsal for a play called Fossil Fools, and Cruise is playing an actor—one Curtis Markson—cast as Digger. That’s the first of the film’s big reveals, though nothing entirely novel for Iñárritu, whose previous movies also sat at the interstice between fact and fiction—see Birdman (2014), another dark comedy built on the postmodern notion that reality is just a construct. Curiously, Cruise’s Curtis looks as puzzled by the play’s caricatural tone as the rest of us, arguing with his director (Sophie Wilde) to an extent that threatens to turn Iñárritu’s gambit into an act of anxious self-defense. “The movie comes perilously close to voicing the criticisms inevitably headed its way,” Rodrigo Perez argues at The Playlist. “That kind of preemptive self-awareness can be irritating—no filmmaker gets to immunize a movie from criticism by acknowledging it first—but Iñárritu ultimately seems after something more interesting than covering his own ass.” Digger (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2026).You could read the metafiction rupture as an attempt to question the role of art in times of crisis, and our yearning to commodify tragedy into fantasy—a debate Iñárritu extends to his film and audience both. That’s a thought-provoking move, or at least it is on paper. “By revealing the story’s structure as a multimedia nesting doll, Iñárritu brings the spectator into his movie’s moral world,” Dana Stevens observes at Slate. “Like Curtis when he breaks character to browbeat the director about the play’s meaning, we are suddenly free to question our own role as the paying observers of a representation of a crumbling, chaotic reality eerily similar the one [sic] that waits outside the theater.” But however promising, the choice does little to strengthen the film’s ambitions.Digger is so invested in its Brechtian framing conceit that it seems to forget the intended purpose of Bertolt Brecht’s signature “alienation effect.” That revolutionary theatrical technique was meant to keep audiences at a distance from the narrative drama unfolding onstage, forcing them to confront their position as consumers of bourgeois entertainment. Instead, Iñárritu immerses us in not one but two fictional worlds that are both so cacophonous and off-putting all we long for is to get home and throw a nice bourgeois entertainment on the nearest streaming channel. There’s a difference between being high concept and being high on your own supply. Digger (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2026).If anything, the twist does not throw film and viewers under scrutiny, but recalls the same brand of self-referentiality that marred Iñárritu’s last movie, Bardo (2022). “Casting [Digger] as not only a censure of environmental criminality (and the baseline villainy that enables it), but also a portrait of art’s power to address such misdeeds, process grief, and help people transcend their fury and misery, Iñárritu’s formal gambit is merely an additional vehicle for preachiness,” Nick Schager suggests at The Daily Beast. The director’s aim may be to stress-test the limits of satire, “but he only lays bare his own,” Katie Kadue astutely notes at Dissent Magazine. “Like Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), which critiques shallow celebrity-driven responses to climate change while being itself a shallow celebrity-driven response to climate change, Digger critiques impotent satires like Don’t Look Up while being itself an impotent satire like Don’t Look Up.” Such short-circuit speaks to the disconnect between the movie’s bombastic form and its vapid content. “An Iñárritu film likes to talk at the same decibels as a trumpet fanfare,” Clarisse Loughrey contends at The Independent, and so does his latest, even as it has nothing substantial to impart beyond some bumper-sticker wisdom about these pestilential times and the monstrous elites who ushered them in. In the words of TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek, [Digger] is pure, empty-headed trickery, a drab-looking gewgaw with a million moving parts and nothing to say, even if it desperately claws at profundity every minute. Greed is evil! Big oil is killing the planet! Human beings are in a pickle! You can believe all these things are true and still find Digger pathetically unpersuasive; it’s so thematically clumsy, even within the ostensible razzle-dazzle of its filmmaking, that it comes off as liberalism’s worst enemy. If human civilization really is nearing its end, assaultive bores like this one aren’t helping.That doesn’t mean the film is entirely pointless, however. To borrow again from Kadue, “Digger is also, at times, gorgeous, and it’s tempting to ignore the film’s content entirely and embrace it as an autotelic work of visual art.” Nothing addresses the interplay between performance and reality more convincingly than Gassner and Johnson’s uncanny production design, an intricate mosaic of translucent screens, rotating panels, and other clever devices heightening the artificiality of all we see and further blurring the boundaries between different narrative layers. And though “the film’s willingness to let anti-satire sit comfortably next to satire gets us nowhere … its revelation that the work behind the illusion can be just as beautiful as the illusion itself enchants us through its very act of disenchantment. Digger’s ponderous ideas get us into a mess, but its images may just dig us back out.”Digger (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2026).Digging a way out of the film’s abysmal box office record, however, might prove a lot harder. Produced by Warner Bros., Digger cost an estimated $125 million to make—a figure some industry insiders believe to be closer to $180 million—and another $100 million to market. But when Iñárritu’s latest hit US theaters in early October, it grossed only around $8 million on opening weekend, even lower than the studio’s conservative $12 to $15 million prediction. As things stand, Digger is expected to lose a staggering $245 million, and as the last movie Warner Bros. released as a standalone studio before it was officially gobbled up by Paramount Skydance on October 6, its flop will no doubt deter the new overlords from betting on bold, idiosyncratic projects like the critical and commercial standouts Warner Bros. had bankrolled just last year—see Sinners, Weapons, and One Battle After Another. For his part, Cruise has taken to social media to prop up the project, though the actor will soon return to his natural IP habitat: He’s set to star in Paramount’s Days of Thunder 2, while the studio keeps teasing a sequel to the 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick. Faced with a deluge of coruscating reviews, Warner Bros. rolled out a new ad in a last-ditch effort to revert the commercial debacle. Glowing quotes from critics the world over sit next to negative takes from their US colleagues—the implication being: The rest of the world gets it, it’s just the Americans who cannot fathom its brilliance. That us-versus-them strategy is jejune at best, but it nonetheless feels of a piece with the film’s patronizing approach to its audience. “The problem isn’t that Iñárritu’s arguments are baseless, or simplistic; it’s the relentlessness with which he tries to corner them,” Adam Nayman argues at The Ringer. Digger “is very much a movie about Getting It, in both senses of the phrase; we’re being brought in on the joke and made part of the punch line at the same time.” That people haven’t flocked to theaters en masse (yet) is ultimately irrelevant; if one is to follow its logic, the film suggests that future spectators will turn to end-of-the-world parables like Iñárritu’s for solace and catharsis, and the smugness with which the film trumpets its messages might be its most grating feature: It takes real nerve to make an eco-horror movie designed to look better and more trenchant as things get steadily worse, and which ends by suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that we’re already there. Is the pointlessness the point? Is that a grimace on the movie’s face or a smirk? One condition of truly great satire—the kind that endures and stays thorny—is that it’s destabilizing. The immodest proposals of Digger are surely wobbly and discombobulating, and that’s an achievement. But even with all the imagery of rising coastlines and submerged streets, Iñárritu knows where he resides. He can’t help but remind us that it’s on the little patch of moral high ground reserved for those who Get It (including the part about being part of the problem). We’re invited to join him there, stranded for two hours that feel like an eternity, as intended, choking down the bitter pills we’ve been prescribed by our resident metaphysician. At least we’re not entertained.