For the longest time, I kept seeing posters for a movie called Digger with Tom Cruise, and my thought was that this would either be an incredible movie that surprises all of us and seems to come out of nowhere, starring one of the biggest and most bankable stars in the world, or it was going to be a complete bomb.
Maybe that’s why the studio was sort of dumping it with mysterious posters in theater lobbies across the country, hoping that people’s curiosity could at least produce a substantive opening weekend.
Well, I don’t want to break down how I think the studio has spent its money on this project. I will just say that Digger, a climate change movie with many twists, one of them being that it’s a love letter to the late, great John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, is essentially too much movie for its own good.
It would be one thing if it chose to focus on climate change and did that with more of a Dr. Strangelove flair, but once the twist happens in the movie, it both raises and lessens the stakes to the point that an audience may be so confused that they no longer care.
Digger is the kind of film that could prove to be a succès d’estime many years from now. It’s the sort of movie that we may hear future film people discussing, saying that it was both prophetic and groundbreaking.
Right now, it seems to be largely ignored. Looking at the images of Tom Cruise, one has to wonder why the marketing people would ever think that anyone would want to see him looking the way he does here.
Digger is not a bad movie. It is just so much movie, with so many ideas packed into one place, that it essentially loses itself and, thus, the audience.
I do give director Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Cruise a lot of credit for taking a huge swing and a miss with a Marvel-sized budget.
