Digger
Digger Rockwell, with the possible exception of when he is in the company of his close personal friend President Compson, is accustomed to being the most important man in any room, a man who wakes as his automatic shutters and curtains rise on the picture window overlooking misty forests beneath his estate, his beloved companion Maggie asleep beside him, aging, as are they both, but carefully ministered to by the best of modern medicine to see one more day.
The company Digger now runs built out of the dirt by his grandfather with his hands and a single shovel, he has spent sixteen years on the groundwork to open the Greenland oilfields, planned output a million barrels a day, all undone in a flash, a widening crack releasing combustible gas which destroys the refinery and splinters the ice shelf, a fragment the size of Maryland released into the ocean currents where it will cause coastal catastrophe wherever it makes landfall.
Mad, brilliant, hilarious, caustic and incendiary, Digger is directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu from a script co-written with Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman with story contributions from Jez Butterworth, starring Mission: Impossible’s unstoppable Tom Cruise in the title role, a man composed of arrogance and ego and absolute certainty of the facts as he has decided they will be, his “art of the deal” bluffing, blustering and manipulating until any negotiation arrives where he wants it.
With 10 Cloverfield Lane’s John Goodman channeling his best George C Scott outrage and bewilderedment as Compson, most powerful man on the planet with near infinite resources discovering that the black gold mine he has been sold in the pristine Arctic environment is an explosive lemon about to blow up causing trillions of dollars of damage and displacing millions, Rogue One’s Riz Ahmed is Cassandra as scapegoat, Doctor Nirav Ganesh, who warned of the risks repeatedly and is now questioned on his unpatriotic ethnic origin rather than his expertise.
With Project Hail Mary’s Sandra Hüller as Digger’s frustrated and overshadowed (half) sister Emma, investing in renewable technologies, like Iñárritu’s Birdman it is a consciously theatrical film working on multiple levels, characters who would seem insane parodies in another time now disturbingly believable in their proclamations of faith to turn the tides of fate as the “genoilcide” movement seeks to hold them accountable, while quietly waiting in the wings is Bugonia’s Jesse Plemons, knowing more about the situation than he lets on.
An outrageous and challenging film of rage against the dying of the world, of conference tables of aging white men kept alive by oxygen tanks who crack jokes as the toll paid by others is counted, Digger is Dr. Strangelove for the modern era and the future yet to come, the tragedy of the “fossil fools” told as comedy where the last bitter laugh is that of the survivors of a disaster prompted by those who lived in hubristic fantasies that their will was greater than nature, acting as though life was a rehearsal and believing money could buy their way out of anything.
Digger is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
