Overview: The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.

Verdict: A curious symptom affects Digger (2026), by Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu. These days, there has been much more discussion about its reception by the public and critics than about the work itself. Apocalyptic fear circulated among social networks that, if Digger is a commercial failure, the beginning of the millionaire defunding of auteur cinema in Hollywood, of innovative and risky cinema, will come. Be sure of something: it is not because of the negative reviews of the critics, nor because of the audience that attends (or not) in its opening week, that the possibility of allocating gigantic budgets to films with some anomaly quota is lost. A space like the commercial billboard never belonged to the creative oddity.

Cinema is a machine of empathy, said the historic critic Roger Ebert. It does not solve the world on its own but is a conduit for what is left after the lights go out. It is in this capacity, through artistic elements, where the nobility of his existence lies. And the intriguing thing, if we really talk about Digger, if we go beyond the score and the summarize it in one sentence, is to notice the breakdowns of that machine that, between calculations and egos, tries to work. You can talk, contrast, nuance, get out of the Like/Dislike binary. If there is one thing that the marketing campaign should not have done, it is to fall into the secrecy and control of narratives that the film denounces. Let’s talk about the film, its characteristics, its meta-stories, Iñárritu’s two alter egos and the place that this occupies in the panorama.

Scientist Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) goes on a date with oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise). Ganesh is his environmental adviser and has to explain to him, then to the American political leadership, and then to the European Parliament, about a glacial calving and the impending climate catastrophe caused by the Digger excavations. This last instance is the one that dr. Ganesh waits: his speech denouncing his boss’s responsibility will serve to uncover the culprits and, perhaps, make those who correspond react.

That great moment of seeing and hearing Ganesh for us, as an audience, never comes. We barely see it broadcast on a low-quality television in image and volume, while Digger waits for his turn to appear before the diplomats. Why doesn’t the camera accompany him to the room? We might think that it is because it is information already known to the public. But it is, above all, because the environmental catastrophe is not what worries the film the most.

We do follow Digger, we see him shouting all over the place. This is where the viral clip of Tom Cruise in character comes from. Without denying Ganesh’s allegations, shamelessly, he rejoices in rebuking that those who condemn him for the ecological damage want to consume gasoline at a low price, spend electricity to charge their cell phones and thus scroll through videos, they want freedom to bask in the comfort of their unsustainable lives. It’s the You can’t be a communist if you have an iPhone, elegant version. From the meta side, it is as useful as it is contradictory that what is popularized is the scene that least represents the central question of the film.

Amid applause and some fights from parliamentarians, Digger Rockwell and Iñárritu do not share the same political stance, but they do share the same emotion and intention. They are fascinated by themselves, by the power of well-intoned lyrics, by the cadence of an interpretation that is capable of making us forget the emptiness of the words spoken. The core of this film is not to report on climate change, although it uses it as context. Nor is it an invitation to community reflection. Long before the denouement, this scene condenses the scheme behind the director: this is what he was waiting for from the beginning.

The phrase popularized by Mark Fisher reappears more and more frequently, and has now been associated with Digger, immediately: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Of course, over the years, and especially in this century, many endings have been artistically imagined while we are living our own, with two recurring elements (although not always combined): the near future instead of fantasy sci-fi, with technology and routines shared with our time; and the saturated parody of oligarchs and plutocrats. We are not saying that Iñárritu is taking these recent productions as a reference.

On the contrary, he emphatically emphasizes to the audience what his references are: he quotes Roy Andersson with his living paintings of desaturated tones and surreal elements; he quotes Kubrick in his military satire and use of wide-angle Dr. Strangelove (1964); brings Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) with the millionaire engrossed in his palace among mirrors and an object symbolic of his origin; includes a poster of John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) so that it is clear to every viewer familiar with (or when the easter egg is released) that both films are a work within a work.

I wonder if Iñárritu remembers the phrase Myrtle (Gena Rowlands) says to herself: We must never forget that this is just a play. Everything indicates the opposite. There’s something of A Matter of Honor (1992)—and it’s not just Tom Cruise—in Digger’s speech in parliament, and there’s some exploitation of the Fellinian grotesque. Digger is a devoted potpourri of a cinema that knew how to talk about issues that Iñárritu himself seems to have a hard time tackling on his own.<> If anything marked the trend towards dystopias set in the near future, although it did so from the drama, it was the premiere fifteen years ago of the British anthology series Black Mirror. Its initial episodes, The National Anthem (2011) and Fifteen Million Merits (2011), pointed out with visual crudeness the manipulation of narratives, the capitalization of social discontent and the false freedom of choice that The Matrix (1999) had represented in the framework of its time. We are 25 years into the future that is the twenty-first century and each new summer is the hottest in history; each technological novelty, an extra way of violating dignity; each conservative leader, a new villain who disguises his meanness with more and more exaggeration, until he himself seems to be an interpreter of a hypergestural self-parody.

The revelation arises in Digger that we are watching the rehearsal of a play called Fossil Fools (in a play on words with fuels, fuel in English). To differentiate the play from the reality behind the scenes, they use the change of aspect ratio, the contrast between the make-up and set desaturated in color (a pallor that is not an invention of theirs, but a direct reference to Andersson). So, Iñárritu and company seem to want to say that what we saw, that increasingly overloaded farce, is part of what is customary to do from art in all times, over and over again.

Why is hypercartoonish comedy often used? As mentioned before, we can remember several recent releases that resort to ultraparody for this: Don’t Look Up (2021) by Adam McKay, Mickey 17 (2025) by Bong Joon-ho, or also, without being about the end of the world but about capitalist voracity, No Other Choice (2025) by Park Chan-wook. Obviously, none of them seeks to work with subtleties. Since we mentioned Fisher, Alfonso Cuarón contributed his quota to the discussion with the drama Children of Men (2006) — set in 2027, by the way — a film that Fisher analyzed in the first pages of his book Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? (2009).

In another route of satire of the rich, there is the one recently taken by Karim Aïnouz with Rosebush Pruning (2026) (with many weak points), in which making the viewer uncomfortable with the scatological and paraphilia is an objective rather than a narrative means: this is the path marked by Ruben Östlund and, with a little more success, Yorgos Lanthimos, with whom Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel El Chivo Lubezki share the use of wide-angles to deform faces and spaces, and accentuate the immersive effect.

Yes, movies no longer tell us anything we don’t know about the practices of these megalomaniacal subjects, but it’s not just about what they say, but how and why they say it. Elon Musk seeks to establish a colony on Mars and the Moon; Javier Milei gives a rock concert, clones his deceased dog and hires an interspecies medium to communicate with him; Donald Trump says climate change is a Chinese invention that hurts trade competition while the YCMA dances. Exaggeration and farce, once a way to diminish the image of the powerful to make it laughable, uncover their nonsense and lose their fear of their authoritarianism (especially when there is censorship), is no longer a tool for ridicule: you can no longer ridicule what is already absurd.

But cinema, as we said remembering Ebert, is a machine for generating empathy and we can try to see where it is headed. Iñárritu seems ready to speak, then, of the real dimension that leads to the creation of these farces, of the impact they have. Later, it seems not, and he becomes more interested in the conflict of the actor, Curtis Markson, who carries the weight of an egomaniacal character clinging to keeping his decomposing cat alive more than the planet itself (a very simple metaphor, without much complexity).

During the rehearsals, in which we can barely know anything about Curtis, a problem arises regarding the location of his daughter, who would have taken a flight affected by a storm. In the midst of all this, Kenny (Jesse Plemons) is lurking, a young man of whom we are told absolutely nothing, and at the same time everything is revealed to us when the rehearsals of Fossil Fools continue: a boy identical to him, with exactly the same characteristics as Kenny, plays in the living room of Digger’s mansion. He is the nephew of Digger, son of Emma Rockwell (Sandra Hüller). Kenny congratulates Curtis on his work and offers to help him locate his daughter. Only someone with immense power could offer something like that, unless it’s a bluff. This character is more transcendent than it seems, and not because of the information he gets for Curtis.

Iñárritu usually has an alter ego in his films. In this one, he has two: one is the hyperbolic Digger Rockwell. Before we talk about the second alter ego, let’s note how we will arrive at it. At a critical point in the rehearsals, Curtis gets out of character, interrupts the pass and claims to the team that they need more truth, less fantasy, because the real Digger Rockwell was never so excessive. From here, what was discovered thanks to the images is explained and even overexplained by Digger’s script to us, his real audience, as the film’s marketing strategy says.

The play’s director, Hannah (Sophie Wilde), argues with Curtis and gives him a summary of everything that has happened in the last twenty years: we are not facing a future environmental collapse, because this has already happened, and the Judy and Kimberly ice blocks—referred to as Kremlin Nova in an attempt by the authorities to redirect hatred of Russians—ran their course. It is understood that the objective is to inform us of the context to reveal the final twist of the plot. But Curtis, on the other hand, didn’t need to be given this news account. He is already informed, even if his position on what should be done on a dramatic level differs from that of his director.

Hannah goes on to say that the families of those who work on the work are also relatives of climate breakdown, that farces are like that, that there is no need for more realism or humanizing a subject like that. Iñárritu begins to explain the meaning of his decisions in Digger, of his excesses, of how farces are still created and watched, of everything we had already realized. These lines of Hannah’s fulfill a double function: the explanatory, so that the audience has no doubts; and the justification (or self-justification) before those who might criticize him, so that, just in case, they will not dismiss him, so that they are convinced that anything that seems like a mistake is something he had planned from the beginning. Iñárritu takes risks and retreats. He says he doesn’t care about the rest, but he does care. But let’s move on to her second alter ego which, of course, is not Hannah.

Kenny is the second Iñárritu. With a communicational style totally opposite to the Digger played by Curtis, Kenny is cordial, courteous, measured, even reveals how he financed the restoration of the theater in which they will premiere Fossil Fools now that it has become a cult classic. In a parallel with Digger himself, Kenny gives a speech by interrupting the argument between Curtis and Hannah. He says that he saw the play fifteen years earlier in a tiny London theater, that he observed all the reactions of mockery and applause of celebration of failure towards his family, interpreted with an exaggeration that they did not have.

He clarifies that this did not make him feel ashamed or humiliated, quite the opposite. He accepts all the allegations about his relatives, agrees with Curtis that his uncle was, indeed, a man of measured, serene behavior, nothing like the farcical characterization of the play, but he was also narcissistic, in bad taste, ridiculous in his ignorance, as the play’s script emphasizes. Both are right. Satire, farce, drama, tragedy, it doesn’t matter. That’s where the detail comes.

It had to be larger than life: Kenny insists that if he has invested his money in buying the rights to the work and now staging it in the most spectacular, most excessive way and with the largest possible economic budget, it is because he has to give people a solid foundation to cross the city to see a work created by people, and give them the opportunity to meet. Indeed, I agree on the innermost essence of this principle. Theater, cinema, recitals, are meeting spaces that make us notice that there are more people looking to enjoy emotions.

It is also of interest to question the usefulness and limitations of what we do from art. What I think is still a problem is the need for the filmmaker to be the one who says everything himself. Iñárritu is not waiting for us to interpret why he has created Digger. He had just been self-explanatory and a few minutes later he is again. To each thought that arises from his viewers, he imprints (unnecessarily) his own verbalization and his signature.

Where is the empathy machine that is cinema, of which Roger Ebert spoke, headed? Up to this point, we felt that we have reached the climax, which is when the story is usually given a close soon. This does not happen. There is something else to do. Iñárritu has more to show, he has one more exercise to propose while he immediately shows us the solution of the book. We have another to-and-fro between the play and its reality. For several minutes, the film extends to show us the last scenes of Fossil Fools, already released to the public. Here, is where something happens that blurs a valuable argument of Digger’s.

The audience of the opening night is shown to us on screen in a way that is far removed from the poetic and closer to the exhibition of video reactions. We see the catharsis of an audience that celebrates what fictionally happens at the end to Digger Rockwell. They are happy to have seen the mocking depiction of an evil ultra-rich, produced by the heir of that ultra-rich. They are watching The Boys produced by Prime Video; they are watching any of the films produced by Megan Ellison, the progressive daughter of the Ellisons, owners of Paramount. It is not a lie that we are surrounded by mega-productions that are presented as criticisms of the system, from which the system itself wins. What detracts from the power is that, once again, he wants to tell us, with a didacticism that is not bad in itself, but he does it with the conviction that he is doing experimental philosophy.

The viewer is not someone with whom Iñárritu identifies. From his omniscient gaze, he sees him laugh contentedly and commiserates his limitation by sitting there, watching Digger while nothing changes. At the same time, ask that you don’t forget that he realized everything (especially if they are Oscar voters). His empathy machine pushes us to empathize with him, the creator of the catharsis that makes us leave the cinema falsely liberated. I go back to Ebert, remembering that he said he looked for films that feel affection for his characters. This becomes more complex if the spectators themselves are among their characters. Does Kenny do all of this with good intentions? The same question can be addressed to the filmmaker and his producers. Let the answer to this question emerge from the conversations. We can’t say so based on his serenity, because we already know that his uncle wasn’t really a second Donald Trump. Villains have a thousand forms. It can be helpful to look at the expectations each of them has about their public image. Farce is not the only method to apply to make people uncomfortable. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, commented on the trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial (2026), and commented that it looks like an awful movie, but that he appreciates people’s creativity.

Mark Zuckerberg is bothered by The Social Network (2010), directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, because it makes him look like a socially awkward man, a traitor in search of validation. However, Jesse Eisenberg told Sorkin of the anguish he felt at the thought that there are those who see the Zuckerberg he played as a hero, this after being intercepted on the street several times by young men who ask him to sign business cards that say: I’m CEO, bitch, just like those of his character. Representation can be useful in some instances, although it does not lead to social mobilization.

I can’t help but regret that the initial conversation about Digger on the internet is based on rivalries between audiences according to their perception of the film. This was painfully fueled by their marketing team. They created a vain dichotomy fed by Iñárritu’s own allies between the real audiences — who, coincidentally, did like it — and those who are not, where they throw bots, critics and ordinary people into the same bag who they assume must be pro-fascist for not applauding them. This is the last thing we need in times when, as Digger seemed to want to say, only the human encounter remains.

That’s where, I believe, one of the great contradictions of the film arises in its social place and with respect to the very harsh cultural panorama. Warner Bros. was eventually absorbed by Paramount Skydance, following a trade war and an underlying interest in control of CNN by the Trumpists of the Ellison family. It is likely that this purchase will have repercussions on the diversity of cinematographic proposals.

Digger proposed that in difficult times distractions appear that stun us and make us point the finger of accuse, and this is what his marketing strategy has ended up doing. That they themselves are disqualifying the public or a certain film press that does not consider it a masterpiece upwards, with all its advertising budget not used before to dedicate it after the premiere to put all this together, produced a distraction for the audiences about those responsible for the maximum problem.

Little commented on, Riz Ahmed’s work is the one to which I find a remarkable value, like that of a false 9 in a football team. His notorious deadpan humor ability in The Phoenician Scheme (2025) has made it easier for him to dose his interpretation in the disproportion of farce. The same can be said of John Goodman as the gringo president in Fossil Fools. In part, they are less talked about because of the focus on something more tangential, such as the Oscar race.

In the face of this, Iñárritu’s choice of the theme and main actor has been well calculated, with all the technical elements correctly worked to win, not only to be nominated, because that for the Mexican is usually something assured. Iñárritu is not an emerging filmmaker whom reviews can insulate from his chances of being celebrated by Academy members.

The presence of Tom Cruise, with the display of his body control with the same solvency with which he hangs from a plane in the Mission Impossible saga, is effective artistically and for the campaign narrative: he is the American icon who returns to auteur cinema to finally win the Oscar for best actor (since Cruise already has an honorary one). Digger has three key elements that tend to easily attract the votes of the Academy: the physical transformation of its lead actor, usually a celebrity, because only a celebrity present in our imagination can surprise by being unrecognizable thanks to makeup, like Gary Oldman in The Darkest Hours (2017); the connection with a real socio-political panorama (remember that if it were pure science fiction, its opportunities would be totally diminished); and the meta-story, which fascinates the American audiovisual sphere. Added to this is the exhibition of audiovisual skill, filming in VistaVision instead of the digital format and a cast crammed with international talents, in which Sandra Hüller is the one who does not lose stage presence, but appears more pale than she usually does (affected by the script, or by the direction).

It has been said that Digger does not offer new commentary on the global crisis. Its objective is more about art in critical times, and it is on this point that I consider that it does not offer something innovative. While all this competition is going on, the millionaires remain rich, with or without the catharsis, with or without the nominations. Some try to offer gestures of reparation, like Kenny with the blockbuster Fossil Fools, just as his mother Emma wanted to do with the Verdant company. After all, even the Roys had Shiv in Succession, inspired by the Murdoch family, owners of Fox News and Fox Corporation. Greenwashing and artwashing exist and will continue to exist. Narrative is a resource whose handling is coveted. The premiere that aims to talk about the power of media narrative and artistic catharsis, is more interested in admiring its own potential within the game. Another contradiction. It’s important for a film to know that there are things more important than itself.

We are standing before the fragments that survive of the world between artifices. At the end of August 2026, we saw how an immense block of glacier broke off in Nepal, which so far has caused more than a thousand deaths and nearly 5000 missing. And let’s not just think about environmental damage. Once, someone told me in a talk about the government’s censorship of Peruvian cinema, that this is a good thing, because from the repression good films will come out, like in Iran. With or without repression, films are made, but repression also results in deaths that no art, no matter how beautiful, deserves it.

Is Digger a simile to the romantic figure of the musicians on the Titanic? Or is that perhaps his message? Although he seems to try to do so, he contradicts himself. The music of that orchestra was not about the desperation of the sinking of the liner, thinking of instructing the passengers in an overwhelming truth. Where we find a simile is in each critically created work, with regrets but with admiration for life, for the cracks of love that surround us.