Tom Cruise’s Return to Serious Cinema Isn’t What It Looks Like
The actor sets action filmmaking aside for a new, bizarre kind of challenge in Digger.
Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET on October 2, 2026
The following article contains spoilers for the film Digger.
Digger Rockwell could be the role of a lifetime. To become the eponymous lead character of the director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new movie, Tom Cruise dons a paunchy bodysuit and is caked in old-man makeup. He dresses in gaudy attire, sporting a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and occasionally a giant prop shovel that his character waves around ceremoniously. His look harkens back to the days of Digger’s tycoon ancestors, who plumbed the earth for the oil that made him the richest man alive. He’s a cartoon vision of billionaire vanity, presented to audiences in a moment of dizzying hostility toward such figures. It’s also the first role for Cruise in nearly a decade that isn’t a pilot or an agent on an impossible mission.
But if you go into Digger expecting a more grounded performance from Cruise (who, once upon a time, was capable of playing real people from the real world), you’ll likely exit disappointed. Iñárritu’s grand black comedy initially seems like a modern Dr. Strangelove—a bleak satire of the end of the world caused by not atomic but environmental catastrophe. But it doesn’t take long for the filmmaker to reveal his conceit: This movie is about the production of a piece of theater called Fossil Fools, one written to satirize a major calamity. The main characters of Digger, then, are all performers; after scenes from the play end, they drop the act, and we see them start prepping for their next rehearsals. But even the cast of Fossil Fools isn’t sure whether the show’s absurd nature can adequately make sense of Earth’s horrors.
I can hear many readers sighing at this revelation, especially given Digger’s oblique promotion. (Some observers began to wonder whether it was a secret musical, given the hermetic and stagy look of its opulent sets.) The actual product is not quite that whimsical; the play-within-the-film, for instance, has an impressive sci-fi scale that transcends practicality. Those moments unfold with dramatic bravado, before the lights dim and the actors begin debating the properness of their endeavor. Iñárritu has created a $125 million blockbuster about whether making art can be worthwhile in the face of tragedy; as a financial calculation alone, it’s a notable gamble.
The Mexican director has made a movie about theater before. The 2014 Best Picture winner Birdman was a behind-the-scenes look at a stage production starring a washed-up Hollywood actor hoping to make a comeback. That was a breakneck satire presented as one continuous shot; it loudly emphasized every theme and observation to the audience in case they weren’t getting the jokes. Digger is more portentous, with some funny moments that see Cruise and his fellow cast yelling purple prose to the ceiling in silly accents. Yet the entire enterprise is shrouded in bitterness, which is a better fit for the miserable outlook on the world typically found in Iñárritu’s work.
Perhaps that perspective is why I have never particularly vibed with the filmmaker, despite his many awards-laden successes. Iñárritu’s early works (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel) are all about people going through the grimmest possible experiences, but their scripts are frustratingly complex. The director has a penchant for spider-webbed narratives, in which disparate folk are connected through curious twists of irony. The clash of heavy-handed realism and fanciful plotting usually rings false for me; though his scope has grown grander with projects such as Birdman and the mountain-man epic The Revenant, they maintain a layer of artifice I struggle to penetrate.
That tendency is better woven into the story Iñárritu is trying to tell with Digger. Cruise’s performance is just one step removed from his over-the-top cameo as a screaming Hollywood executive in Tropic Thunder. As we see the mask fall, however, we witness his (quite transfixing) portrayal of the actor playing Digger, who’s as perplexed by the role’s grandiosity as the audience likely is. The narrative of Fossil Fools finds the character as he realizes his oil-drilling operation has caused a geographic incident that could lead to the death of millions; quickly enough, he ropes in the Bible-thumping president of the United States (played by John Goodman), the simpering vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg), and a do-gooder scientist named Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) to avert the crisis.
The group quickly realizes that nothing can be done and that even if they could avoid this mishap, plenty more are coming. The characters continue to hammer away at blithe arguments, with each satirical point about the utter worthlessness of the people in charge scored at the highest possible volume. The film calls to mind Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, another wry disaster movie that grabbed the audience by the shoulders and shook them as hard as it could to get its message across. But Iñárritu’s extra coat of despair is compelling. Digger is set in a more far-gone version of our world; the performers treat their roles almost as echoes of reality, a way of remembering tragedy rather than warning about the future. Sure, not everyone will dig it. But as a Hollywood-star project, its existence is fascinating.
This article originally misstated the name of the play featured in Digger.
