I think Digger is going to be one of those movies we talk about very differently five years from now.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 2026 satire is huge, abrasive, funny, strange and absolutely unwilling to play things safely. Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, an enormously powerful oil magnate whose company has helped unleash an environmental catastrophe. That’s about as much plot as I want to reveal, because part of the fun is discovering exactly what kind of movie Digger is while you’re watching it.
What I can tell you is that this isn’t simply a movie about climate change or a cartoonishly evil billionaire. Digger is interested in something messier: who gets to tell the story, who benefits from the version we choose to believe and how easily we can criticize a system while continuing to participate in it.
Watch: 5 Reasons You Might Like Digger
5. It’s a Satire About Who Controls the Story
The environmental catastrophe gives Digger its plot, but I don’t think that’s really what the movie is about.
The larger question is storytelling.
Digger Rockwell’s company has clearly contributed to something disastrous. But Iñárritu isn’t particularly interested in spending two hours asking whether powerful fossil-fuel interests deserve blame. Instead, the movie keeps shifting our attention toward the stories people create around responsibility. Who gets to explain what happened? Who decides who the villains are?
And how much hypocrisy are we willing to overlook when the version of the story being told makes us feel better about ourselves?
That’s where Digger becomes more interesting than a straightforward climate satire. It targets corporate environmentalism and institutional hypocrisy, but it also points back at an audience that enjoys criticizing capitalism while consuming products created by enormous corporations.
There’s a line involving a piece of tuna that captures the idea perfectly: if you think you know where something came from, you can tell yourself it’s okay.
The movie keeps asking how much of modern life works exactly that way.
If you like satire that makes everyone uncomfortable - Dr. Strangelove, Network, Wag the Dog or The Big Short - there’s a lot to chew on here.
4. Riz Ahmed Is Funny, Angry and Complicated
Riz Ahmed plays Dr. Ganesh, one of the scientists inside Digger’s organization and one of the few people who seems willing to acknowledge exactly how serious the situation has become. He’s also one of the funniest characters in the movie.
Ahmed plays Ganesh as perpetually exasperated, like he’s been explaining the same obvious scientific facts to people for years and has finally run out of patience. One of my favorite scenes begins when Digger simply tells him to tell the truth.
Ganesh does.
He unloads everything he believes about what has happened and the people responsible for it. It’s satisfying because someone is finally saying what everyone else has been avoiding. But then the movie complicates the moment. Ganesh has been working inside this machine for years. It paid him. It gave him influence. He understood what it was doing and continued participating anyway.
That contradiction is important to Digger. The movie isn’t particularly interested in dividing everyone cleanly into morally righteous people and bad people. It is much more interested in what happens when people condemn a system while materially benefiting from it.
Ahmed gets to be furious, righteous, hypocritical and extremely funny at the same time. It’s one of my favorite performances of his.
3. The Production Design Is Part of the Story
Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson’s production design initially seems merely extravagant. Digger’s mansion is exactly what you might imagine an eccentric oil billionaire building for himself: enormous spaces, natural wood, ostentatious decoration and imagery celebrating the world that made him rich. Then the movie keeps going, and those rooms start feeling different. Spaces repeat. Backgrounds begin looking slightly artificial. Paintings and decorative details start feeling suspiciously obvious. An enormous image of oil fields can suddenly become an enormous image of untouched nature somewhere else. The production design stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like part of the movie’s argument.
Emmanuel Lubezki shot Digger entirely in VistaVision, and the images are beautiful, but beauty isn’t really the point. Iñárritu and his collaborators are constantly using framing, artificiality and scale to make you question what you’re looking at. His films have always been visually deliberate, but I don’t know that production design has ever been this integral to how one of his movies communicates its ideas.
This is the kind of movie where the room someone is standing in may be telling you almost as much as the person talking.
2. Tom Cruise’s Parliament Speech Takes Over the Movie
There are two enormous monologues in Digger, but talking about one of them would reveal far more than I want to spoil. So let’s talk about the Parliament speech.
Digger eventually finds himself standing before a global audience trying to explain how everything came to this point. His argument is essentially this: You can hate people like me…you can blame corporations…you can pretend this world was forced upon you.
But you also like the world oil built.
It’s a Howard Beale moment. The movie stops allowing the audience to comfortably place all of the blame onto an obvious villain and turns the accusation outward, and Tom Cruise performs the sequence in roughly one continuous ten-minute take. Just an actor standing in a room and completely taking control of a movie.
Those scenes are often harder than the stunt work because there’s nowhere to hide. Cruise has to sustain the rhythm, emotion and physical performance while the camera choreography continues around him. I knew the scene was long while watching it but I didn’t realize just how long until afterward.
That’s usually a pretty good indication that an actor has you completely locked in. I think it’s one of the great movie monologues of recent years.
1. Tom Cruise Gets Weird Again
Tom Cruise has spent much of the last two decades becoming the patron saint of theatrical blockbusters, and I love that version of Tom Cruise, but I’ve missed the actor who occasionally decides to get strange.
The guy from Magnolia. The guy willing to become Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. The actor who is willing to distort his image rather than protect it.
Digger Rockwell is grotesque. The body is different. The hair is different. The voice is different. His posture and physical rhythms are different. After a while, I stopped seeing Tom Cruise.
That might be the biggest compliment I can give the performance.
This isn’t the movie star racing across rooftops or hanging from airplanes. It’s Cruise reminding us that underneath the mythology surrounding him is a genuinely adventurous actor who can still create an odd, layered character when somebody gives him material strange enough to justify it. Whether the Academy agrees or not, I think the performance deserves to be in the awards conversation.
And more importantly, I hope Cruise keeps making movies this weird.
Who Should Watch Digger?
Watch Digger if you like movies that take enormous swings and give you something to argue about afterward.
It should especially appeal to fans of:
Dr. Strangelove
Network
Wag the Dog
The Big Short
Birdman
ambitious black comedies and political satires
Tom Cruise performances outside his usual action-hero persona
movies where the filmmaking itself becomes part of the argument
This is not a particularly passive movie.
If you want everything explained clearly and every character assigned an obvious moral position, Digger may drive you insane.
If you like leaving a theater still trying to figure out exactly what you just watched, that may be a feature rather than a bug.
Where to Watch Digger
As of this post, October 2026, Digger is playing exclusively in theaters and IMAX.
No official U.S. 4K UHD or Blu-ray release has been announced yet. I’ll update this page when legitimate physical-media information becomes available.
Prefer to Listen?
You can also listen to this Force Five recommendation as a podcast episode.
Digger on the Force Five Top 5 Radar
There are two future Force Five lists where I could easily see Digger appearing.
Top 5 Monologues That Take Over the Movie
Digger’s Parliament speech belongs in the conversation with moments like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and Quint’s Indianapolis speech in Jaws—scenes so powerful that they temporarily swallow the entire movie around them.
Top 5 Movies That Take a Huge Swing
You can love Digger or hate it, but what I don’t think you can call it is timid. Iñárritu and Cruise made a huge, expensive, structurally strange satire and committed completely to the idea.
In baseball terms: it’s a triple to right center.
More Force Five:
Force Five Live: The Tom Cruise Draft
A full Force Five draft devoted to Tom Cruise’s filmography, with critics Chris Bumbray and Sean O’Connell.
Top 5 “Blank Check” Directors
A perfect companion to Digger’s enormous creative swing: filmmakers you’d hand a pile of money and let make whatever they want.
Primetime (2026)
Another ambitious 2026 satire interested in institutions, media, storytelling and the uncomfortable relationship between the people creating a narrative and the people consuming it.
Anniversary (2026)
Another politically charged recent film that uses a heightened story to explore larger ideas about institutions, ideology and the systems people participate in.
