Digger - Movie Review

The Movie: Digger

The Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

The Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons

The Story: 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.

The Rating: 3 / 10

The Review:

After press screenings of movies, our PR reps ask us to give a few initial thoughts about the movie as a sort of temperature check from critics. When I approached the rep outside the auditorium and she asked what I thought, all I could say was "No...just...no."

The experience of watching this movie was quite painful and, after maybe the first ten minutes or so all I could wish and hope for was that it would be over soon. This made me really sad because I love Alejandro G. Iñárritu's movies, he's easily one of the most talented directors out there although it has been over ten years since his back to back hits The Revenant and Birdman came out.

The movie is filled with social commentary, political commentary, and climate crisis commentary, all of which is valid and very relevant to what we are experiencing in our lives today. The problem here is how the story is told. It's obnoxious, it's overbearing, it's confusing, it feels very self indulgent, and it's just a mess of a movie that tries to do too much. The whole thing is just ridiculously over the top in ways that make it impossible to enjoy.

I will say that Riz Ahmed is pretty fantastic in this movie I think because his performance isn't quite as outlandish as most everyone else. The arc his character gets is also quite brilliant and points to some of the really ingenious thoughts behind what could have been a much better movie than the final result turned out to be. I believe this movie looked a lot better on paper and I'm sure everyone was super excited about taking on this project. It's ambitious and inventive but unfortunately those traits don't always land the way they were intended to or as we hope they might.

From a technical standpoint, there is a lot of really great stuff going on but none of it justifies everything that's bad about the movie. Iñárritu is known for long, extended take shots and he pulls off a few epertly filmed shots in this movie. Visually, there are scenes that are beautiful to look at on a big screen, we were shown the movie in IMAX, but again it's not worth the effort to try and sit through the experience.

Thank you for reading this review, I don't want to spend much more time on this review and I really don't have anything else to say about it. For those of you who prefer to wait for movies to come out on streaming instead of going to see them in the theater, this is one instance where I'm not going to argue that idea. I wouldn't even recommend watching it any format so take that for what it's worth.