Alejandro González Iñárritu

Digger (2026)

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This one’s going to be difficult to discuss without giving away too much, given the nature of the film itself and the misleading marketing campaign that has led up to its release. For anyone who has heard that Digger is a musical and hoped that was true, I must disappoint you, but the amount of work that has gone into preventing the real shape of this film from being known before you enter the theater is roughly the same as what went into disguising that the recent film adaptation of Mean Girls was a musical. This bait-and-switch marketing technique obviously hasn’t resulted in the Digger landing for everyone, given that it is currently doing worse in the critical rankings than the latest Coleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, but I’m also going to have to talk around the things that really make it work in order for you to know if it’s going to be worth your time.

On at least some level, as the trailers have indicated, “Tom Cruise is Digger,” aka Digger Rockwell, the third generation of a family of oil tycoons. He lives in a house filled with corpses, surrounded by stuffed and mounted fauna, fowl, and fish; one shot finds him standing between two mirrors that are each framed by dozens of sets of deer antlers, so that there is only Digger Rockwell and death into infinity. The only living thing that he cares for is a dying cat named Maggie, whom he is continuing to try to keep alive despite her thirty-year life span clearly having led her to a place of misery. In an establishing character moment, he sends away the world’s leading veterinarian despite the man’s honesty because he would rather deal with someone whose fear of disappointing Digger is greater than their intelligence. Just before his half-sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) is set to announce the establishment of her subset company to the greater Rockwell oil empire, a clean energy initiative, a Rockwell Inc. drilling facility in Greenland explodes due to a buildup of methane, resulting in imminent disaster for most of Europe. This results in the gathering of Digger’s long-ignored climate safety scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the United States President (John Goodman), and his various attendant prayer warriors and warhawks to discuss what has to happen next, Dr. Strangelove style. But this is only one level of the narrative and must necessarily be the only one that I’ll address in this review, since it’s the only one indicated by the marketing.

Digger is as funny as it is knowing; it is a version of Don’t Look Up where the satire actually works, one that understands that it is useless to turn the monsters who have created the world that we live in now and in which our children will live shorter lives than we will into figures of ridicule and mockery, but also that there is value in doing so even if it can change nothing. The demonstrably evil people who currently pull the strings of government are cancer-riddled, destructive, morally incomprehensible ghouls, and we are largely impotent to stop them from killing us. Even when they are gone, when all the wealth that they’ve amassed still doesn’t stop them from dying because death is inevitable, when they are beyond the reach of justice, the only thing that we will have is our ability to laugh at them, to turn the thieves of our future into clowns for us to mock and belittle for their small mindedness, arrogance, and ignorance. It is a very small thing, and laughing at the dead ghouls who stole the future isn’t going to change our material conditions, but when it is all that we have, we must nonetheless laugh, because if we don’t then we have nothing.

It’s often said that it is impossible for Tom Cruise to completely disappear into a role. No matter how hard you try, you are never watching Ethan Hunt or Frank Mackey or Lestat de Lioncourt; you are watching Tom Cruise. Although that argument has lessened in recent years, especially after his all-out charm campaign around the time of Tropic Thunder, this is perhaps the role that is so unlike the man’s public image (and looks, thanks to prosthetics, sufficiently different from him) that he’s able to give a layered performance without reminding you that this is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Sandra Hüller is unfortunately given little to do, but it’s always good to see her. John Goodman gets a lot of mileage out of playing an incompetent president clinging to life and willing to destroy the whole world for no reason other than his vanity, but really, this is Cruise’s film. There was a lot of mockery online about the “his whole career has led to this” trailer that was produced for the film, but this is one of his all-time great performances, up there with Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky.

Digger is currently a new release, so I won’t reveal any more about it, other than to say that it quickly shot up to being one of my favorite films of the year, based on its comedy alone. It’s not one that requires you run out to experience it on the big screen, although there are definitely visuals that will reward you if you do; you can wait for streaming (and you might have to, if you don’t act soon). You’ll laugh however you see it, and the laughter will feel both impotent and uplifting.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Revenant (2015)

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bear

threehalfstar

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest is a difficult film to pin down in terms of quality. The Revenant is at times an intense spectacle of intricately detailed action choreography, but it’s also a meandering slowburner of a film that constantly reminds you that you’re watching Important Art. Its cinematography (provided by master of the form Emmanuel Lubezki) is gut-wrenchingly beautiful, but is often employed for such an empty purpose that it leaves you feeling cold. It aims for High Art severity in its narrative consequence, but the grotesque savagery of its rape & pillage masculinity feels like a well-constructed exploitation pic from a bygone era. I’m tempted to group it in with other arty, all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go slowburners that were impressive but impossible to connect with (for me, anyway) like Only God Forgives & The Tree of Life, but I enjoyed too much of the film to dismiss it that easily. What is clear is that Iñárritu should at the very least be commended for not following up the critical success of Birdman (a film I was less than kind to) with a carbon copy of his most high profile film to date. I appreciate him sticking his neck out there, even if the results were the ultimate mixed bag of soaring successes & cringe-worthy missteps.

Part of what makes The Revenant so frustrating is its daunting 156 min runtime. The film’s opening battles between white men fur trappers & tribes of Native Americans and Leo DiCaprio’s protagonist & a pissed-off mama bear are breathtakingly savage, epically orchestrated orgies of visually striking violence. At the other end of the film, a  concluding knife fight between DiCaprio’s beaten-to-shit protagonist & Tom Hardy’s selfish brute who wronged him ranks up there with Friedkin’s The Hunted as one of the best hand-to-hand combat scenes ever committed to film. The long stretch between those heart-racing anchors, however, are painfully in need of some shrewd editing. It’s tempting to think of The Revenant as a revenge film floating somewhere between a Western & an exploitation, but a majority of the film is a travelogue. DiCaprio, Hardy, two opposing bands of American & French Fur trappers (one headed by Domnhall Gleeson, who’s been batting a thousand lately), and a revenge-hungry native tribe all slowly trudge toward an inevitable climactic bloodshed (while still recovering from the one that opened the film) in an unnecessarily-detailed step-by-step procession. At times the film itself feels like DiCaprio’s broken protagonist, crawling & gurgling blood for days on end under the weight of an over-achieving runtime.   Shave a good 40 minutes of The Revenant by tightening a few scenes & losing a shot here or there (as precious as Lubezki makes each image) & you might have a masterful man vs. nature (both human & otherwise) revenge pic. As is, there’s an overbearing sense of self-importance that sours the whole ordeal.

For the most part, though, the self-importance on display in The Revenant isn’t nearly as off-putting as it can be in Birdman. For instance, Lubezki’s camerawork is just as showy here as it was in Iñárritu’s Oscar Winner, but it ditches the single-extended-shot gimmick of that film in favor of a more tasteful line of highfalutin action cinematography. There are some gorgeous transitions from intense close-ups to long tracking shots in impossibly smooth single-swoops, but these shots are broken up in a way that Birdman‘s unrelenting gimmick of a structure allow for. Plot wise, The Revenant echoes the loud & obnoxious majority vs. the righteous intelligence of the few in the know that turned me off so sharply in Birdman (with Hardy anchoring the obnoxious brute end of that equation & DiCaprio serving as the righteous), but it’s not quite as much of a turn-off here. At worst, the preciousness & empty philosophy of lines like “As long as you can still breathe, you fight”, “Remember what mother used to say about the wind?”, and endless mutterings of “You are my son, you are my son,” (similar to the way Sean Penn whispers “Mother” into the void for hours in Tree of Life) are worth a hearty eyeroll or two. At best, they’re a nice break from watching DiCaprio gurgle & crawl his way through the snow. The dialogue in Birdman was much more off-putting.

Like I said, there’s too much of The Revenant that resonated with me to dismiss it outright. I’m more than willing to forgive an overwrought image or two (there’s a particularly egregious moment when a white bird emerges from a bullet wound, for instance) in exchange for the film’s more successful flashes of brilliance (like the bear & knife fights). For all of The Revenant‘s try-hard stabs at achieving High Art through hyper-masculine brutality, there’s a hell of a lot of praise-worthy ambition & striking imagery that’s well worth the patience required to make it through the perilous journey of its over-inflated runtime. Shorten some its travel time through montage & soften the cheese factor of its philosophical mumblings & I might even have heralded it as a masterpiece of brutish revenge cinema.

-Brandon Ledet