Sorry, America, Either You’re Too Stupid to Get It or DIGGER is Just Better Than You Are

It’s been a weekend and a day since DIGGER had its theatrical release, and the internet is crawling with terrible reviews. If you only paid attention to the loudest reactions, you might think Tom Cruise just made one of the worst movies ever and should probably have his seemingly indiscriminate creative control taken away from him.

The numbers certainly give people something to point at. DIGGER opened with only about $8 million domestically and $20 million worldwide against a reported production budget somewhere between $125 million and $150 million, before an estimated $100 million in marketing. It earned a C+ CinemaScore and gave Cruise one of the weakest openings of his career. That is a genuine box-office disaster.

But somehow “this movie bombed” very quickly became “everybody hates this movie,” and those aren’t the same thing. Rotten Tomatoes currently has DIGGER at 51 percent from 263 critics but 71 percent from more than 500 verified audience ratings. That sounds less like unanimous rejection and more like a really strange movie that people are having wildly different reactions to.

Watching the trailers, and reading anything that wasn’t a spoiler, it had actually been kind of hard to get a sense of what this movie was even going to be about. True to modern internet theory, though, the narrative seemed pretty well established before the thing ever had a chance to breathe and let people decide for themselves.

So I got myself out of the house Monday afternoon and went to the local spot to watch Tom Cruise’s story about a billionaire oil digger or something, I guess.

Since I didn’t start KazooWatch to keep my opinions to myself, I feel like the right thing to do here is be brave enough to give this currently, loudly panned movie the attention it deserves and ultimately the KAZOO rating it deserves from me.

That’s right. I said KAZOO.

Now hear me out.

At first glance, it’s really easy to throw stones at Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu for making a climate-conscious movie, or really for saying anything of substance at all.

You’re a celebrity, Tom. How dare you make a political statement.

I understand why people are exhausted. Most of us want entertainment to provide a safe place to escape the incredibly frustrating landscape of social interactions that politics has driven our country to become. I completely disagree, however, with the increasingly prevalent notion that art is supposed to keep its mouth shut about current events, politics, religion or God for that matter, when these things have always been among the great sources of inspiration behind our most important and entertaining art.

You know it’s true.

It’s gotten to the point where everything belongs in either a red basket or a blue basket, and people seem to get confused about what they believe because they haven’t checked the latest prescribed narrative.

It’s gotten nutty. It’s gotten ridiculous. It’s gotten terribly absurd and unpredictable.

DIGGER completely understands that.

Iñárritu says the movie does not come from a simple ideological position. He describes it instead as an exploration of human nature, power and the kind of ambition that can turn one person’s profit into everybody else’s problem. More importantly, he says DIGGER is about “the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions,” and about the way language can change our perception of reality. He rejects the convenience of sorting everything into simple heroes and villains because reality, as he puts it, is complicated and contradictory.

That is the movie I watched.

Unfortunately, explaining too much about DIGGER would ruin a large part of what makes it such a ride, and I’m not going to do that to you. Iñárritu doesn’t particularly want to either. Press screenings came with requests to reveal as little as possible, and he has compared trying to explain the experience to trying to explain what a mango tastes like to somebody who hasn’t eaten one yet. You have to experience it yourself.

So my goal here is not to tell you what happens. It’s to make you go in ready to appreciate the delightful absurdity of a movie trying to cross almost every party and demographic line it can find.

Can a story actually get all of it from all sides?

Apparently it can.

And DIGGER became one of the smartest, wildest adventures in movie watching that I’ve had in a long time.

Make me feel something. Do something different. Write something original, they said.

But not that.

That’s too political.

Come on, man. Really.

You might just find out that you’re wrong about some things.

DIGGER certainly has plenty to say about climate change and fossil-fuel greed, but stopping there sells it short. It looks at political power, wealth, government, corporate responsibility and the strange collection of people who end up making enormous decisions for everyone else. Iñárritu spent roughly nine years developing the movie while watching the world, its fears and its obsessions change around him. He has called the finished film both a warning and a love letter to younger generations, using humor as a way for us to recognize ourselves inside all of the absurdity.

And absurd is definitely the word.

Cruise completely commits to it. He doesn’t play Digger Rockwell like Ethan Hunt got himself an oil company. He lets himself look ridiculous. He lets the character be arrogant, grotesque, funny, pathetic and occasionally even sympathetic. For somebody whose career has spent decades constructing TOM CRUISE, MOVIE STAR, there is something genuinely refreshing about watching him willingly tear so much of that image apart. Iñárritu has even said Cruise loved the role because it freed him from the handsome, strong-man image audiences associate with him.

Then there’s John Goodman as an absolutely ridiculous President.

Extra special mention to Goodman because he may simply be the GOAT. He’s really, really old now and apparently that has done absolutely nothing to stop him from walking into something this strange and understanding exactly what movie he is in.

And LOOK OUT! It’s Jesse Plemons.

That’s all you’re getting from me.

At this point, Jesse Plemons appearing in a movie should probably come with a warning label. Something weird, intense and potentially great is probably about to happen.

But underneath all of that insanity, the first couple things I really took away from DIGGER were pretty simple.

The world is run by a lot of people who do none of the actual work and often know surprisingly little about what is really happening, even though their decisions are helping cause it.

And Washington, D.C., constructs narratives, tells stories and makes you see what it wants you to see.

BUT SO DOES HOLLYWOOD, BABY!

That is where DIGGER really clicked for me.

Everybody is telling a story. Politicians tell one. Corporations tell one. Billionaires tell one. Artists tell one. The press tells one. The audience walks into the theater already carrying one.

Iñárritu says DIGGER is ultimately interested not only in what happens, but in who gets to tell us what happened afterward. He talks about narrative as something capable of reshaping reality and about artists documenting a history that is usually written by people with power.

Which makes what happened to DIGGER after its release almost too perfect.

The movie bombed, so the immediate story became that audiences rejected it. The critics leaned negative, so the story became that it was simply a terrible movie. Warner Bros. responded by leaning directly into the disagreement, building a campaign around dramatically different reactions to the same film and the line “SAME FILM – DIFFERENT TRUTH.”

Then The Guardian made the whole thing even better. Days after publishing a brutal review calling DIGGER shallow and self-congratulatory, the same publication ran an essay arguing that this spectacular flop is actually a misunderstood masterpiece destined for reevaluation.

Same movie.

Completely different story.

That’s hilarious.

It’s also kind of the point.

There are absolutely people who hate DIGGER, and I’m not going to tell them they just weren’t smart enough to understand it. The movie is messy. It’s loud. It is packed full of ideas and deliberately goes places that will irritate some people. Even a relatively positive Associated Press review describes it as audacious and visually powerful while acknowledging that its satire doesn’t always land.

That’s fair.

But a movie taking a huge swing and occasionally missing is a very different problem from a movie having nothing interesting to say.

At some point, America, we’re going to have to get our act together and work together.

Or not.

Whatever.

But I refuse to accept that the answer is for art to stop talking about difficult things because somebody might disagree with it. Especially when we spend the rest of the year complaining that Hollywood never does anything different.

DIGGER did something different.

And it bombed.

Maybe audiences genuinely don’t want it. Maybe the marketing never figured out how to explain what the heck this movie was. Maybe spending more than $125 million on a strange political black comedy starring Tom Cruise was always an insane financial proposition. Maybe the critics are right and I just have terrible taste.

All possible.

What I’m not going to do is let an opening-weekend box-office number tell me what I thought about the movie I actually watched.

And at the end of the day, you almost have to wonder if people are actually hating DIGGER, or if this whole thing is a worldwide conspiracy by the elite and the slightly-above-middle-class to shut Tom up before too many people see it and realize what a one-of-a-kind masterpiece DIGGER turned out to be.

Obviously that’s ridiculous.

Probably.

But for a movie this interested in who gets to construct reality, I think DIGGER would appreciate the theory.

I went into the theater barely knowing what Tom Cruise’s billionaire oil digger movie was supposed to be.

I walked out having seen something completely nuts, completely original and interesting enough that I was still thinking about it long after the lights came back on.

That’s enough for me.

KAZOO for Tom Cruise.

KAZOO for Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

And KAZOO for DIGGER.

Go decide for yourself.