Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director you may remember from The Revenant and Birdman, has made a film with Digger that is nothing more than that friend of yours who constructs convoluted sentences in an attempt to look intelligent, constantly stuffing academic terms into those sentences, until all you want is for him to shut up and leave you alone. The world is a gigantic chaos in which countless different good and bad things are happening simultaneously. If cinema is anything at all, it should be a Romantic-period painting that allows you to look at all this chaos from the outside, calmly and critically; simple, unpretentious yet magnificent, and capable of expressing what it has to say clearly. Digger, on the other hand, is that arrogant, endlessly talkative friend, and much like Picasso’s Guernica, it is nothing more than a gigantic mess in which everything is tangled up with everything else. The problem is that, unlike Guernica, it is not even a meticulously crafted work of art that you could stand in front of for hours, carefully examining every single detail. Digger is a game show in which you have 130 minutes to understand what the film is trying to say, endure Tom Cruise’s performance, which could essentially be summed up as “look, I’m actually a serious actor too,” and, if you manage to survive all of this, earn the right to leave the cinema at the end as your prize.
You either make political satire or you don’t. You either like political satire or you don’t. But you cannot completely absolve your film, which is already a product of a billion-dollar industry, by saying, “Look, we think political satire is becoming industrialized too, and we are criticizing that.” Yes, Digger indirectly criticizes itself; through the play within the film, it even discusses the possibility that political satire itself can be transformed into a spectacle, a product, and ultimately a form of consumable entertainment. But being aware of your own contradiction does not make that contradiction disappear. Both the way you criticize yourself and all the other criticisms the film promises to make drift aimlessly across the surface of the water, much like the broken-off piece of ice in the film.
Digger opens up the climate crisis, fossil fuels, politicians, the wealthy, political satire itself, the commodification of art, the relationship between performance and reality, and even its own existence to discussion, all at once. Each of these is an issue capable of carrying an entire film on its own, yet Digger sits them all around the same table and refuses to let any of them finish what they have to say. What emerges as a result is not a complicated film, but a film that tries to present its own complexity as depth. The chaos of Guernica allows you to see everything at once when you look at it, whereas the chaos of Digger often does not even tell you what you are supposed to be looking at. If a discussion in which everyone screams at the top of their lungs and the loudest person simply drowns everyone else out can be called democratic, then Digger can be called a good film.
Digger could have chosen to be Don’t Look Up, even at the cost of becoming overtly rhetorical. At least then, it would have expressed what it had to say more directly and could have placed its subject in front of the audience for discussion without getting lost among all these convoluted layers of political satire. Instead, Digger chooses to become an extremely tasteless mixture of Birdman and Dr. Strangelove, melted together in the same pot.
