Digger

In a year full of phenomenal flops, when Coyote vs. Acme is Warner Bros biggest summer hit—and it barely manages to crack $100 million worldwide—this film Digger towers over them all. I mean, seriously: Moana, Supergirl, Masters of the Universe are the high profile flops, but remember The Bride!? I mean, I barely do. The trailers looked repugnant. I don't even remember films like Desert Warrior and Crime 101, do you? Desert Warrior didn't break one MILLION dollars worldwide on a $150 million budget! Crime 101 managed to clear all of $72M, which sounds better until you realize it had a $220M budget.

Meanwhile, Obsession is sittin' over there at infinity dollars on a one dollar budget. (Hollywood also made a number of modest- to low-budget flops, too, so they've really locked in the failure formal.)

The only big flop I saw this year was 28 Years Later: Bone Temple. The Boy and I liked it, but neither of us would be putting it high on the recommend-to-others list. It's idiosyncratic, strange, and flawed.

Digger is a masterpiece, on the other hand.

But there's a catch: Clearly they were aiming for Dr. Strangelove and what they got was Birth of a Nation. Let me explain:

Technically, this movie is, I daresay, nearly flawless. Set decorator Anna Pinnock (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Life of Pi, The Fifth Element) has a long track record of making dodgy movies (Lost in Space, Clash of the Titans, The Golden Compass) beautiful, and she does outstanding work here, as did the team of art directors.

To explain why, I have to be a little spoilery. Actually, I'm gonna "spoil" the whole thing eventually in this review, 'cause you're probably not gonna watch it, and even if you do, the "twists" are not really The Sixth Sense sort of things. Knowing probably isn't going to affect your enjoyment much, because once you realize the conceit, subsequent "twists" are all in the same fatalistic field.

Digger starts as a complete farce, with Tom Cruise as the eponymous oil man, waking up in his opulent bed with his ancient, incontinent cat. He's fat, out of shape, combover, stiff, old—

I first became cognizant of Mr. Cruise in early 1983, or possibly 1982. I was sitting in a theater with my father, the opening piano riff of "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll" came on, and he slid out in his socks and shirt. The girls started screaming, and my dad and I just sort of looked at each other, like, "Huh." But I sometimes think about those girls, in their 50s today, and wonder if Cruise's "eternal youth" was sort of buoying. You know, "He doesn't look that old! Maybe I'm not that old, either!" I wonder how these scenes would impact them.

Anyway, Cruise is great here. One of my favorite performances of his, though lately, even his Action Man stuff is carrying a lot more gravitas. The only place I questioned his age (reminding myself that there are plenty of 62-year-olds in worse shape the octogenarian he was playing) was in certain close scenes where his energy, especially in the small motions of his hands, was not that of an 80-year-old old man. Then again, not even that of a 62-year-old man. 

The acting, needless to say, is top notch all around. John Goodman is very convincing as a near corpse President. Robert John Burke, who has apparently had quite a storied career since I last saw him in things like Nighmare Weekend and Thinner, is the Jack D. Ripper character. Sandra Huller (Project Hail Mary, Anatomy of a Fall, Toni Erdmann) is his long-suffering green-believing half-sister. Jesse Plemons (Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia) is...okay, it's spoiler time.

After the first act preposterousness where the greedy, uncompromising Digger forces his Greenland crew into drilling when it's clearly not safe, and Greenland predictably explodes, we pull out and discover—

—this is all for a play.

This instantly alienated both me and the Boy, but dammit if director Iñárritu (The Revenant, Birdman) doesn't win us back.

Initially, I thought it was just an excuse for the excesses of the first act. It kills the momentum and makes us wonder why we should care about this story of catastrophic global warming. "You are not watching real people," it says, "but a dramatization put on by hysterics."

Now, the thing about this switch between the play and the actuality, is that it gives all those art/set directors and SFX guys a chance to shine. The movie transitions seamlessly between very good modern effects and effects one might see in a play—albeit a very technologically advanced play. 

A play being put on in the future.

And what we discover throughout two plus hours is that we're watching the most finely constructed eco-pornography ever made. This would make the '70s blush. Soylent Green is made out of people? Everybody's a hippie vampire? The ice age/radiation/whatever is going to wipe out all life on earth? All fine, if dreary, in the large. Ironic distance, abstract concepts, allow us to view horrors that we would otherwise be disgusted to admit enjoying.

Digger, on the other hand, gives you the close-ups. Lines of bodies (close-up on children!) in Europe! Manhattan under water! (Which, I've been promised for twenty years now and I'm getting a little impatient.) Stop the carbon? Too late for that! You can't drive, you can't eat steak, you can't do nothing because it's all doomed the planet, and nothing can stop it.

In the nearly packed (albeit small) Santa Monica theater I saw it in, the couple in front of me clapped loudly when it was over. The People's Republic was the perfect place to see this film. 

Dr. Strangelove stopped when the bombs dropped. Because, let's face it, the aftermath wouldn't have been very funny to even the darkest-of-humor connoisseurs. Digger starts after the climate bomb drops. And then delivers thirty minutes of lectures which, in practice, are only ever used to enslave humanity. ("You consume too much," intones the elitist from his private jet, "therefore I shall take your...straws!")

There is one point, during one of the most amazingly staged sequences ever put to film—and this film reminded me a lot of Megalopolis—Digger is surrounded by world leaders, and doing (in essence) the Jack Nicholson speech from A Few Good Men. Much like A Few Good Men, if it's meant to alienate us from the speakers POV, it fails. We do need Jack Nicholson on that wall. And we do need oil.

The movie acknowledges this. Digger even says most of us wouldn't be here without oil so we have to weigh cost/benefit, this is also true. But the movie never does this. It just assumes the absolute worst of any oil production company. Hell, it begs all the questions, just by being structured as it is. 

"Can't argue now, denier! The world's already apocalyptic!"

The funny thing about Birth of a Nation in comparison is that it actually was taking place in the future. I watched Digger like I was Walter Sobchak. "Say what you will about the tenets of the Ku Klux Klan. At least it's an ethos."

Apart from the 30 minutes or so of soliloquies, though, this movie is perfect. Well, that and this tired, tired, tired trope of the President and his cabinet being religious nuts. This trope was tired in the '80s, and it's weirdly archaic here, as if Christian religious fanaticism in the White House—I mean, just, what?

It does fit in with the whole Birth of a Nation idea, though: There are people we like and people we don't like, and the ones we don't like aren't getting a fair shake here. And sort of like Oil Milkshakes, you really have to come in with your prejudice against oil production—which we're giving a passing nod to here as the savior of millions—in place. This movie isn't for the unconvinced: Birth might have been more effective propaganda.

Oh, this was another weirdly anachronistic aspect: The old white Christian men running the country—are exclusively old, white Christian men. I mean, it was 1983 when James Watts made his tactful remark that he had a staff with "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple". Very strange!

But apart from these issues, you can see how the cast and crew would've been excited to make it. Everyone did a great job. The Boy said fifteen or twenty years ago, this probably would've been a hit. The real problem, I think, is tha the whole "climate change" is over.

It's been canceled because we need ten or a hundred times more power for AI and data centers. And the stories about the villains who are building those are already in te workse.