a.k.a. Dr. Strangelove 2: Electric Boogaloo

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Screenplay: Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacomo, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu
129 mins. Rated R for pervasive language.

Good on Warner Bros. They’ve put together a film that has so many surprises and have been able to keep all of them hidden behind a clever and unusual marketing strategy. There’s so much I cannot tell you about Digger. I want you to see it the way I did, and I don’t want anything to take that away from you, so if you’re looking for the short short review of the film…first, click on a few of the ads on this site and buy some stuff you don’t need (Daddy needs ad revenue), and then go see the damn movie in a few days and savor the wildly complicated film that Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (The Revenant) has created. As always, I’ll keep it as spoiler free as I can, but this excellent piece of cinema has a lot of inspirations, but I’ve rarely seen anything like it.

Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick) has gotten us into one hell of a pickle when his oil drilling operation in Greenland causes a potentially cataclysmic disaster. Determined to save the world (or at least save his name), he partners with his company’s climate scientist and President Compson (John Goodman, Monsters Inc.) to put things right…by taking zero accountability.

We open on a run-down version of Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu badly in need of a renovation and meet Digger Rockwell, one of Cruise’s most abstract creations. In many ways a cowboy play on his character Frank T.J. Mackey from Magnolia, a salesman at heart who knows how to twist a conversation and sway an audience, Digger feels like the character Cruise has always been meant to play, not only a damning satire of rich men who cook the world and then fuck off, leaving the rest of us the bill, but also the power of storytelling as accountability and teaching us to laugh so we can get a break from crying. Digger Rockwell is an American icon, faults and all, forcing others to conform to his precious worldview (“I don’t speak Celsius,” he states early on) and refusing to take accountability or see the damage he’s set in motion. With his dying 30-year-old cat Maggie in his arms (an intricate and baffling puppet effect) and clinging to another of his companies that prides itself on environmental safety, Digger’s excuse is simple: he just gives the people what they want.

Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler) and John Goodman are also standouts in this bleakly humorous satire, the former being a climatologist who has signaled the alarms for years to deaf ears and the latter being a very biting version of a president who believes himself ordained by God and infallible in any way while asleep at the wheel as a governmental figure (surely no one you’d know). I also loved seeing Robert John Burke as a military leader with the believe that any problem can be solved with the right weapon. Burke’s a great performer who always shines in these deeply flawed character pieces. Sophie Wilde also shines in a mystery role and I’ll leave it at that.

The set design is excellent, always winking at the audience and hinting at a larger scope while being fundamentally Iñarritu, borrowing from Birdman’s character/caricature walkabout style. The costumes and makeup create this pale facade on everyone’s faces as the world unravels around them. This is a beautifully ugly world, but it feels lived in and authentic to the world.

I don’t love the musical score and the sound design, both nauseatingly effective for sure but neither helpful in supporting Iñarritu’s vision. The finale also seems a little easy, but everything leading to it is so BOLD and mean and truthful that I can get over it. Iñarritu’s film is swinging for the fences and I will always enjoy ingenuity when so much else is comfortably same.

Digger may not be as funny as Birdman nor as intense as The Revenant, but it’s a ballsier film and an overall harder sell, tackling some of the darkest material out there and doing so with a wink and a nod. It’s going to piss off a lot of people who want a very specific film, and I doubt the people who need to see it will actually buy a ticket, but this one is a funky amalgam, a cosmic gumbo…a dig that I dug.

4/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For more Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu: Birdman