Digger – Let’s Get Nuts!

It has taken much longer to write this review than I intended because of writers’ fatigue. The incessant and exhausting discourse around cinema that has escalated in 2026 has worn me down. So instead of a review, I tried to work out what led to all this noise.

Plenty of the discourse started out as positive; celebrating movies achieving great success without what were once considered the two strongest pillars of movie-making: a huge budget and a celebrity lead. And that success raised questions about the amount of money spent on films which have bombed. Pitchforks (I mean, phones) came out as it was time to shout about how we’re all fed up with the movie 1% laughing it up while we poor all starve, flicking through 10,000 options on Netflix.

Much movie discussion in the previous week had centred on Digger. This is the latest film from director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, who is most famous for – depending on who you ask 1) back-to-back Best Picture Oscars or 2) having achieved nothing and wasted money since those wins. Prior to Digger Innaritu made Bardo, a film I really enjoyed. Bardo explored Innaritu’s own relationship as a (now) Mexican-American via show-stopping dance pieces, desert wanderings and the hunt for a missing axolotl. It’s not like Innaritu isn’t trying to wind us up every time he makes his art. That film’s full title is ‘Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. It was a uniquely weird experience that I don’t want to repeat, and yet, four years later, Bardo stays with me.

Innaritu films are also not known for their realism, with perhaps 2003’s 21 Grams being the closest to a standard drama. That film widened his audience and then, just like Michael Keaton’s Batman, Innaritu thought “Let’s get nuts!”

Tom Cruise heard the call. Hearthrob, hero, cinema’s last bastion of ‘the movies’ as an event in itself and not somewhere people go to slurp, smooch and doomscroll, inside this crowd-pleasing man is a real weirdo screaming to get out. He has form, some of Cruise’s best performances come from him teetering on the edge of what makes a star persona. He made Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and Eyes Wide Shut, three remarkable movies asking a lot from the audience, and rewarding them with dynamite Cruise screen presence. But that run ended in the early 2000s. Cruise held out his arms and accepted the golden shackles of the Mission Impossible franchise. It enabled him to control the action in every sense of the word, and the box office receipts, but it clearly didn’t satisfy that internal weirdo. Cruise wanted to explore his range again, even though this man’s Wikipedia page is so full it includes a Table of Contents!

It makes sense that an eccentric auteur and child of modern cinema would want to work together, demanding that no expense be spared and having the cachet and self-belief to get Warner Bros to fund it. This oddball pairing created their own wild, post-apocalyptic dream.

Those having read this far looking for a hint of the plot will be disappointed. Digger is a rollercoaster. Many say it’s not good, and the lack of interest from the public suggests it’s not intriguing either. If good means ‘popular’ or ‘by the numbers’ then these reviews are spot on. This film is clever, pretentious, patronising and full of cinematic feats. Digger indulges Cruise’s desire to simultaneously rail against the machine (and his audience) while hiding behind big ideas and prosthetics. It has twists and laughs, cringey awkwardness and convoluted arcs yet, fundamentally, it is never, ever boring.

Maybe you don’t want to spend your money on such a wackadoodle movie. That’s fine, I didn’t have to pay for it and I was given free popcorn! There’s plenty of other films to watch this year. But if you decide to turn on Digger when bored of that Netflix scroll at 10pm on a rainy Sunday, I won’t judge. We all go a little mad sometimes, don’t we?