Here’s something that caught my eye with trailers earlier in the year and seems to be earning a pretty divisive reception—from Alejandro González Iñárritu, known for the likes of Birdman, comes what was marketed as Dr. Strangelove for the climate change age, and slathering Tom Cruise in old age makeup. So, do I stand with those that say this lives up to the ambition, or could it stand to use a shovel bashed across the brain?
Well. Here’s the thing. The film starts off as a fairly conventional satire on big business ignoring climate disaster for the sake of profit—Cruise himself does a fine enough job with all those excised Thetans he paid wazillions for…er, with all that experience he got playing comedic roles in Tropic Thunder and such. Then, at a certain point in, it…basically turns into a satire of itself as well. And here is where for some it starts dancing on a very fine tightrope between becoming a lot more interesting, or disappearing up its own backside.
Even so, that’s not to say there’s no entertainment value or anything—it moves along on a decent pace, and the supporting cast is fun. Riz Ahmed is a scathing enough climate researcher trying to reign in our titular oil baron, and John Goodman steals the show to a degree as a demented US President. There’s one scene in particular where he decides that while he’s here, he might as well chew the scenery, then annihilate it in a tornado of glorious gravelly ham as only Goodman could muster.
But here’s the thing—while the satire is obvious enough in parts, it does lose a little focus. We have an extended speech from Digger in a European parliament where he basically calls modern society hypocrites on the issue at hand, and, well, for something that gets so much screen time it’s hard to tell where it fits into what the film is trying to do. Not to mention, it gets kind of drowned out by the aforementioned lunatic escapades anyway.
And, well, being a satire of satires, when satirists are struggling to keep up with the real world as it is? That also feels fuzzy, considering that despite what the film seems to posit at one point, some people really are just self-evidently cartoonishly stupid.
All this being said I didn’t hate Digger completely, and as said it has its moments—it simply feels like the result of giving a third-year film student a Hollywood budget, cast, and resources. It’s a student who obviously has an idea they really want to put into play, and wants to make it interesting, but is still a student nonetheless.
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