Inasmuch as the trailer for Digger features more than men in rooms shouting, it appears to be a sci-fi film. Sort of? There’s been buzz about Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger since Warner Bros. showed a little bit of it at CinemaCon this spring; most of the buzz was about Tom Cruise’s transformation into a frumpy, rumpled, paunchy older man. Any details about the film’s plot seemed secondary.
Well, now there’s a trailer, and the plot is still somewhat secondary to Cruise, in full transformative-Oscar-bait-mode, carrying around a half-dead cat and yelling about everything. (At least they didn’t even try to make the cat look real.) To a degree, this trailer feels like a ludicrous version of There Will Be Blood. The synopsis says only “The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.”
And he seems to intend to prove that by fighting an iceberg? I think? There is really a lot of shouting. And because the film is about climate change, “Burning Down the House” plays in the background. A sense of un-reality pervades the whole thing, and the cast is certainly game for it. Said cast includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Robert John Burke, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman, and Sophie Wilde.
Digger is directed by Iñárritu (Babel) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman; Iñárritu and Berman have story credit. It’s in theaters October 2.
