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Has there ever been a good movie about climate change?
The Day After Tomorrow, from the filmmakers behind Independence Day, was hokey disaster schlock; Don’t Look Up, from the director of The Big Short, was a relentlessly cringey metaphor movie; the little-seen How To Blow Up a Pipeline was somewhat better, but its intendedly sympathetic tale of climate radicalism was an own goal that inadvertently indicted its activist-terrorists as neurotic whack jobs. Interstellar and Project Hail Mary are much better films by any measure, but their status as “climate cinema” is at least arguable. And they are, rather notably, about the importance and vitality of risk taking and human ingenuity in the face of civilizational challenges, not pious lectures about consumption, capitalism, and environmental doom. Smug, self-satisfied lectures about human depravity generally don’t make for great movies.
Turns out that’s true even with a top-tier director and the world’s biggest movie star. Digger, the new movie from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and star Tom Cruise, is a spectacular misfire, conceptually bold and occasionally intriguing, but mostly just an exercise in teeth-grinding awfulness.
In fairness, the film actively intends to be terrible. It’s an over-the-top satire of climate villainy, with a prickly oil baron (Cruise) as its central figure and a pompous president (John Goodman) plus his cabinet of advisers in supporting roles. Shortly after the film begins, an oil rig on a glacier explodes, creating a massive iceberg that’s headed straight for Europe, with untold casualties and damage likely. Whatever shall they do? Mostly, it turns out, stand around and exclaim things to each other in intentionally hammy accents. The overacting is excruciating; the satire is brutally on the nose. It’s painful and unpleasant to watch, and, all right, it’s supposed to be. This is not interpretation or speculation.
To explain why requires some spoilers. You’ve been warned.
See, it turns out that the overacted, hammy, unbearably obvious bits are all part of a play, a play that we eventually find out is being performed decades in the future, after the real-life climate catastrophe depicted in the play actually occurred. These future citizens are looking back and laughing at the climate follies of our present, but as the film goes on, it becomes clear that they are living through the very real consequences of that folly. The future is a postapocalyptic climate wasteland where the consequences of climate change have been all too real. Cruise’s actor character, the man playing the oil baron, repeatedly argues with the director about the tone, asking whether the hammy satire is appropriate for the subject matter. We are supposed to understand that, fundamentally, it isn’t.
The film’s big idea is, essentially, that you should feel bad about laughing, about escaping, about enjoying, well, anything, really. And so it forces viewers to sit through a willingly rotten bit of theater in order to drive home the point that satire isn’t enough, and indeed, entertainment can be a cheat for the wealthy and powerful who want to escape real responsibility.
I’ll say this for Cruise and Iñárritu: At least they had the daring to lecture us conceptually, to force viewers to engage with their message through a theatrical, metanarrative conceit. They’re trying, and while this hectoring climate change movie is, like others before it, a failure, it is, at times, an interesting failure, an ambitious disaster. But it’s still a disaster.
Making an intentionally turgid and terrible production and then underlining how awful it is doesn’t really change the fact that it is turgid and terrible. This high-concept wreck of a movie wants people to feel rotten about enjoyment, about humor, about the pleasures of art and escapism in the face of what it views as a totalizing global disaster. This is a movie intentionally designed to annoy, to irritate, to grate on your nerves in order to make a point. It wants you to feel bad about watching it, and in that sense, I suppose it succeeded.
