Digger
A movie about posting through it.
Most movies like this are about trying to stop a disaster before it spirals out of control. Some say this is a satire of our times like Dr. Strangelove. Some say it’s a satire of satire itself. I think something far more cynical is at play. In Iñárritu’s worldview, our complete, reckless destruction of our only home is far too tragic to make jokes about. That’s why the jokes in the movie are rarely actually funny. Because it isn’t funny that we are burning our house down while we’re all still inside and we kept electing leaders who insist on locking the doors.
Iñárritu understands the disaster can’t be averted because it has already occurred. We are merely trapped in the slow moving fallout. There’s nothing to fix. All we can do is adapt and hang on. And if we’re going to do that we might as well make art about it that brings people together. Why suffer alone when we can suffer together and lighten the load?
That’s what makes the twist so compelling. We’re not watching the disaster unfold. We’re watching a play being performed about the disaster many years after the fact. Rather than watch the man who caused all this reckon with his choices, grow, change, and avert the crisis in a moment of triumph, we witness artists reckoning with the merits of dramatizing the events.
Do the men who broke the world deserve lionization? What the artists at work think is irrelevant, because the play is being paid for by the descendants of the men who broke the world. It doesn’t matter that the version of events depicted in the production isn’t even really accurate to what actually transpired. Money talks, and it’s what the money wants. It’s all cope anyway. The actors are free to not work if they so choose. Art and patronage have always gone hand in hand. What happens to art when it is controlled by patronage? Another metatextual layer.
I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie like this. A big, bold, audacious feat of filmmaking. The twist is insane, unlike any I’ve ever seen. It hoodwinks the viewer, makes a fool out of them. “You thought you knew what this movie was? HAHAHAHA! Fuck you.” A lot of people do not like that feeling and if you don’t then you will probably have a hard time with this movie. As for me, I loved it. I never saw it coming and it totally swept me away.
The production design and VistaVision cinematography are breathtaking. The whole thing feels luxurious from the clothes to the rooms. The $180 million budget is on full display.
Tom Cruise hits the pedal to the metal right from the jump and never stops, here to remind us that our Greatest Movie Star is also a fucking great actor. The standout scene sits right in the middle of the film when “Digger” is placed on “trial” in front of the world’s nations. Cruise launches into a 10 minute monologue to defend and justify his actions. He never stops talking, never stops moving. It’s an astounding piece of acting and filmmaking. Cruise and the entire production are firing on all cylinders. To say nothing of John Goodman having the time of his life as the president in a satire of our gerontocracy, or Riz Ahmed, or the guy from Robocop 3 as the sniveling SecDef. And it’s always nice to see Michael Stuhlbarg.
“Digger’s” defense lays bare the harshest truth: yes, he destroyed the world, but only because we asked for it. We demanded electricity to power our lives and he provided the fuel to make the electricity. Is he responsible for destroying the world? Or are we? Is he the greedy one? Or is it us, the glutinous masses who demand better from our overlords but do nothing to change ourselves?
Not everything works. Iñárritu’s zaniness gets a little unwieldy at times and the plot becomes hard to follow. The transitions between the play and the real world are so jarring as to feel surreal, and the balance between them is a bit off. I would love to spend more time in the dystopian world, but I doubt that’s what Iñárritu was really concerned with. But the film’s ideas are so grand, the message so urgent, the swings so big, that it’s easy to look past its flaws. It’s already grown in my estimation just over a couple days thinking about it.
As my friend Nick said, the irony of a movie like this is the sickos will love it, but it was made to wake up the general masses who will not see it. It will be ripe for reclamation inside 10 years.
Fossil Fools is a play about the world’s richest man, being paid for by his nephew, a tech billionaire whose company makes money by controlling and suppressing information. Digger is a movie about a play about the world’s richest man, financed by a company that was purchased by a tech billionaire who is gobbling up all of the social media, cable news, movie, and TV studios. He says he’s not trying to control the media, but we’ve heard they before. As the graffiti on the wall says as the credits roll: compliance is freedom.