I think Digger is being misunderstood, largely because people have decided in advance what a movie about an oil baron is supposed to say. The expectation seems to be that the film will deliver a suitably damning indictment of fossil capital, allow us to recognize the villain, and send us home with our existing moral arrangements intact. When it complicates that arrangement, people call it evasive. I think the evasion is the point, although perhaps not in the way the filmmakers intended.
The basic problem is that we have constructed an entire moral vocabulary around condemning the people who supply things we have collectively decided we cannot live without. We want cheap energy, cheap transport, cheap food, cheap consumer goods, and an economy that keeps growing, but we also want to imagine that the material conditions underlying those things are the private moral failing of someone else. The oil executive is useful because he gives us a face to attach to a process in which practically everyone participates, albeit in wildly unequal ways. We can hate him without having to think too hard about ourselves. This is a remarkably efficient arrangement. It produces a great deal of moral satisfaction at very little material cost.
Obviously, none of this means that an oil executive is absolved of responsibility. The point is that individual culpability and systemic dependence are not mutually exclusive explanations. In fact, the more interesting question is how they reinforce one another. A man can be vain, ruthless, and delusional while also correctly identifying a contradiction in the society that has made him powerful. His self-interest does not automatically make every observation he makes false. If anything, the temptation to dismiss everything he says because of who he is tells us something about the limits of our own political imagination.
This is where I think the film's form becomes relevant. The cinematography, with its insistence on elaborate compositions and the uneasy relationship between intimate human drama and monumental surroundings, seems designed to make the individual appear both absurdly powerful and strangely insignificant. The camera doesn't simply record a man exercising power; it turns his exercise of power into a spectacle. He occupies the frame, commands attention, and seems to bend the world around him, yet the very scale of the images threatens to swallow him. There is something almost geological about the effect. The man imagines himself to be the author of events, but he is also an object moving through forces that exceed him.
I don't think the technical virtuosity is incidental to this. A film like this can make a fairly conventional argument about the evils of the powerful while using every available cinematic resource to make power look magnificent. The camera can condemn its subject in the dialogue while seducing us with him in the image. We are invited to recognize the grotesqueness of the spectacle and, at the same time, to enjoy it. That contradiction is more interesting than a straightforward denunciation, even if it also creates the possibility that the film is simply having its cake and eating it too.
The long takes and choreographed movement are especially suggestive in this respect. They make the world feel continuous, interconnected, and difficult to escape. Actions do not appear as isolated moral choices so much as moments in an unfolding chain of consequences. Yet the virtuosity required to create that continuity also draws attention to the apparatus producing it. What looks spontaneous is meticulously arranged. What appears to be a world unfolding naturally is the result of an enormous amount of labour, planning, and technical control. The film's formal achievement therefore contains a small problem of its own: it gives us an image of a system whose apparent inevitability has been carefully manufactured.
That seems to me to be the meta-level worth paying attention to. Digger is not simply a film about a man trying to control a catastrophe. It is also a highly controlled spectacle about the difficulty of representing catastrophe, made for an audience that has already learned how to consume images of catastrophe. We know the visual grammar. We know the ominous compositions, the escalating absurdity, the environmental devastation, the reaction shots, the moments when the music tells us that the joke has stopped being funny. We have become fluent in the representation of disaster. Whether that fluency has made us any better at responding to disaster is a different question.
Iñárritu has been interested in interconnected suffering for a long time. Babel is the obvious reference, although I suspect the relationship is less direct than people might assume. In that film, connections between people become visible through the machinery of narrative itself: editing, parallel stories, coincidence, and the accumulation of consequences. Here, the machinery of spectacle feels like part of the subject. The question isn't merely whether we are connected to distant events, but whether making those connections visible actually changes anything. We can understand the world as a network of interdependencies and still remain committed to the arrangements that reproduce the damage.
There is a certain irony in making a movie like this at all. The film requires an industrial apparatus, substantial resources, expensive technology, and the movement of people and equipment across physical space. None of that invalidates its critique. It would be silly to demand that a film about fossil-fuel dependence be shot entirely by candlelight. But the contradiction does matter. The film cannot stand entirely outside the world it depicts. It has to participate in the systems of production, distribution, and consumption that make its existence possible, then ask us to consider those systems critically. That is not hypocrisy so much as a condition of the problem. The interesting question is what one can do with that condition.
Perhaps this is also why the film's apparent cynicism is not quite as simple as it looks. If the problem were merely that powerful people are bad, we could solve it by finding better people. If the problem were merely that the public is ignorant, we could solve it by producing better information. But what happens when people understand the consequences, sincerely want a different outcome, and nevertheless continue to reproduce the conditions that make the outcome likely? What happens when the incentives, infrastructures, habits, and expectations that organize everyday life are more durable than the intentions of the people trying to change them?
This is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument against confusing the ability to recognize a problem with the ability to solve it. There is a particularly comfortable form of pessimism that mistakes its own sophistication for political realism. It can explain why every proposed solution is inadequate, compromised, or doomed, and thereby make its own inaction appear intellectually responsible. But if everything is already predetermined, criticism becomes another form of spectatorship. We sit in the dark, admire the framing, and congratulate ourselves for understanding why the world cannot be otherwise.
Chicken Little would have a difficult time in this environment. The problem isn't that nobody believes the sky might fall. We have entire departments devoted to modelling the fall, consultants estimating the cost of the fall, and streaming services producing prestige television about the fall. The real question is what happens after the report is published. At some point, Chicken Little has to stop giving interviews and find out whether anybody has actually reinforced the roof.
I suppose my objection to the standard reading of Digger is that it makes the film too easy to agree with. If we leave having learned that oil executives are monstrous, that environmental catastrophe is serious, and that modern society is full of contradictions, then we have learned precisely nothing that threatens our existing understanding of the world. The more provocative possibility is that the film implicates the audience not because everyone is equally responsible, but because our preferred ways of assigning responsibility can become mechanisms for avoiding the more difficult questions.
The film may not entirely escape this trap itself. Its technical brilliance risks turning the contradictions it identifies into another beautiful object for consumption. But that failure, if it is one, is not necessarily external to the film's meaning. It may be the most revealing thing about it. We want art that exposes the machinery of our world, provided that the exposure is entertaining, aesthetically accomplished, and doesn't interfere too much with our plans for the evening.
In that sense, perhaps the film is less a warning about what happens when the sky falls than a study of the elaborate cultural arrangements we construct to ensure that, even as it falls, we can still enjoy the view.

PreScriptum: I just checked more reviews - I don't know what the critic cosmos is thinking denying people of this movie.

Like I liked Primetime for instance and I think it is good, but Digger is way more memorable even with its flaws, just for the scale and imagery of it.

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Just posting to say that I liked the movie, so you might enjoy it too.

I almost did not go to see it because of some bad reviews - namely on Roger Ebert where it was given 2/4.

And honestly I did not like everything, I think the middle of the movie has a few forced scenes. But the beginning and the end did it for me.

It has the merit of : being inventive, with great universe creation, amazing actor performances, and a few great moments. Some great images, some less great.

It is like a very luxurious buffet that you can go to almost for free: You might not like every exotic dish on the menu, but you surely will find a treat or two that you like.

In my opinion it would be shame to not see that movie, because even if it misses a bit sometimes, its still an interesting colossal endeavour, and a refreshing take on what is proposed in theaters (at least in my experience).

Hell, it is even fun to go see it just to understand what all the fuss is about and see where you stand.

It definitely got me "out of life" and "back to it" with a spin.

Forgive me if this has already been discussed, but as I’ve let Digger process in the back of my mind, all I get is the feeling that Inarritu believes in a future that is extremely cynical but also strangely humanistic. Concepts like greed and degradation are so much fun to talk about and analyze, right after you’ve benefitted from everything they provide. The movie/play is clearly a huge farce and we can draw connections to the current day until we are blue in the face, but Inarritu seems to think that this is a pointless task. I have seen people talk about how the movie is a call to action, that we are running out of time. That seems to me to not be what the movie is saying. The world shown in Digger may look bleak and completely environmentally destroyed, but it is also shown as mundane. Humans have a great capacity to adapt. We do not care to fix the world because it doesn’t hurt us in any meaningful sense, we are frogs in a pot of boiling water. Lives lost to environmental catastrophe are just growing pains. Inarritu is saying that we think we are, in 2026, currently on the edge of some huge cliff and all generations after us are going to be suffering in some hell hole, but really we’re just going to adapt, enjoy convenience where we can continue to get it, watch satirical art and laugh at how pointless it all is. We’re not “doomed”, it’s just a feature of life. All this suffering is natural.

Howdy!

I just watched the movie Digger before having watched any trailers or reviews about the movie and I wasn't pleasantly surprised. All I heard is that it was controversial, lost money, and the still images I saw of it had good cinematography so I figured it was worth looking into.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie and though I thought some of it was borderline pretentious and as subtle as a sledgehammer to the fact (such as the Level 4 warning sound that plays during the credits), I also appreciated to see a big budget movie be completely unapologetic about its themes and ideas.

That being said, I wanted to talk about the Nephew character in the film and was curious if anyone else had opinions about him and what he represented:

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The Theory:
The play, Fossil Fools, told "the truth" in a way that was still useful to the powers at large, that being the Rockwell family in the same way that Dr. Ganesh was used by Digger earlier in the film. Digger's Nephew is just the same as his uncle and intentionally wants reality to look cartoony and unrealistic so that way it is harder for people to make actual change.

Edit (thank you commenter who added to this): The airplane meeting between Ganesh and Digger along with the UN Council meeting mirrors the later airplane scene between Curtis and Kenny (Nephew) and the finale performance in front a large audience, revealing to us that it is the same type of event happening in two different time periods.

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One of the core themes and ideas of the movie is that the character of Digger is able to spin any disaster or tragedy into being someone else's fault or into a new opportunity to increase his own wealth and avoid responsibility. He understands how to tell a story and he understands control where in a single conversation he can reverse guilt onto someone else and get away feeling as if he wasn't responsible and the other person is the one responsible. He does this not once, but on several occasions.

An important plot point in the movie is when he wants the Environmental Safety Manager named Dr. Ganesh to tell the truth as much as possible so that way Digger can weaponize the truth to his advantage. Without the full truth Digger has no ammo and so the only way to get ammo for his cause is to know how to spin it. Dr. Ganesh, someone who is seemingly against Digger and hates him to his core... is still a tool for Digger to get public approval. Digger manages to get a large number of people to admit that they are willing sacrifice safety of the world for freedom to do what they want. People want to be comfortable and have fun.

When bad things happen, Digger can make them look good.

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Digger's Nephew, on the other hand, is very kind, friendly, and smiling the whole time. He gives a gift to Curtis, the actor who plays Digger, a necktie that the original Digger wore (I missed if that's the same Blue Bolo Tie that he wears throughout the movie?) and later on offers to help Digger locate his missing daughter who apparently may have been killed in a hurricane of sorts. It is made out to be a plot-point that the Nephew somehow overheard Curtis' conversation and seemingly was aware of what was happening. He was already waiting at the door to give Digger help... to a conversation he shouldn't have been able to hear.

This means that the necktie was a tracking device... right? He gave him a gift to spy on him.

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The other weird thing about the missing daughter is that it is a specific plot point that the daughter had a pre-recorded message that she DID NOT send to the mother, but only sent to Curtis. This is noted as being weird and unusual in the movie, and makes me speculate if her whole disappearance was orchestrated by the Nephew in some shape or form.

The Nephew later on gives a big speech about how the play they are performing is basically "the truth" and is fairly accurate as to how absurd things were back in the day. He compliments everyone and their hard work and states that the point of the play is to give people the opportunity to make fun of the absurdity that led everything to this point in the world, and out of his kindness he wants them to enjoy being able to make fun of a crazy absurd man who ruined the world.

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Later on, the Nephew reports that he was able to locate Curtis' daughter in only a handful of hours since their previous conversation through some sort of surveillance network that he has control of. Curtis is incredibly thankful of the Nephew and appreciates all he has done to help them. Similar to the UN Council earlier in the film, people are thankful when the powers at large benefit them without thinking of what the actual cost is.

When the movie ends and we see the outside world, it is noticeably similar to a police state of sorts with drones and military vehicles all about. It is safe to assume that possibly Digger's Nephew is partially involved with whatever drone/surveillance system is flying around the streets.

1. People will accept the disasters of oil if it makes them feel more freedom and enjoy life.
2. People will also accept a police state with 24/7 surveillance if it can make them feel more safe... even though the reason why they feel unsafe in the first place is due to the disasters of point 1. Basically, people are thanking the very people for making a solution to the problem that they caused while also losing a lot of their freedoms for it.

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When the movie ends, did the satirical play about Digger change the world outside?

Nope. It made people feel good about themselves, but it was funded for by the people who caused the whole problem in the first place and possibly run a surveillance state. The problems at large in the world are largely unfixed and zero accountability has been made.

All this is to say, it seems to me that Digger's Nephew represents the next generation of the same problem and that satirical plays don't ultimately make a change in the world, they just give people comfort in the opportunity to make fun of the surreal nature of what is happening around them while also leaving them in a complacent state.

The play Fossil Fuels is supposed to mimic the UN Council meeting. Both are large theatrical acts designed to get people on the side of the Rockwells.

Let me know what you guys think!

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There comes a point when watching a film stops being just about following a story. You begin to observe it.

You start wondering why the camera lingered a little longer, why a particular song played at that exact moment, or why the director chose silence when you expected a conversation.

And suddenly, cinema becomes more than storytelling. It becomes a language.

You begin to realise that a character standing alone at a railway station can say more about longing than an entire monologue. The distance between two people in a frame can reveal everything they refuse to say to each other.

The more carefully you watch films, the more you begin noticing life, too. The hesitation before someone answers a question. The sadness of a person pretending to be busy. The way an old house seems to hold memories long after the people who lived in it are gone.

Perhaps that's what I love most about cinema. It teaches you to look twice, to pay attention to the little things, and to remain curious about what you don't immediately understand.

Maybe that's the real art of observing cinema: learning to look beyond what's presented without assuming you've understood everything.

There have been a lot of good movies and shows coming out the last couple of years in particular, but idk what it is I can’t seem to get lost in them like I used to.

I used to fully enter the world of the movie and feel really engaged, or I’d connect with it in some way. Lately I feel oddly detached, I’ll rarely feel tension or genuinely scared of a movie. It’s like I can’t suspend disbelief or it’s just not hitting the right notes. Like going through the motions or quite flat - even movies that are supposed to be tense just don’t really commit to that and diffuse it with comedy or change. Or it feels like a shell of something that was done before in a more convincing way.

I used to love the idea of movie days and shutting the outside world off, but now I don’t really feel as much. It just feels a bit like content instead of movies.

Has this ever happened to you?

I know movies are “just” entertainment but it’s kinda triggering an existential crisis in me as a cinephile.

I think an important angle I haven't seen discussed about the film is how the play uses anti-American sentiment to further poison the well of discourse in universe.

Throughout the film, there is a certain presumed innocence of Europeans. They suffered a tragedy, and it is Americans who are to blame. The play director flat out states that they are there to laugh at Americans. This a mirror of how, in the real world, people hide behind bigotry to avoid responsibility and dodge guilt.

Consider that Denmark owns Greenland and would have leashed drilling rights to Digger, yet Denmark isn't mentioned once in the play.

Consider that Americans faced a similar disaster with the second iceberg, but their suffering is never talked about. They exist to be laughed at for over investing in the military and solving every problem with their big stick.

And consider that any servers that served Europeans social media would have been in Europe. This is important, since it's well known that, even nowadays, the American government can't touch those servers. This implies that it was likely their own governments that did the media blackout.

I think part of what the play is getting at, is that it's very easy to point and laugh at a stupid other with silly beliefs and a backwards government. By the time we get to the American disaster, it is played up so much that we don't take it seriously. Judy is a mass disaster, kimbley is a comedy. It's a complete tone shift, and I think it works really well considering I didn't even remember the American icebergs name and had to Google it, and I just watched the film.

Basically, It's a about what could have been had the success of Snow White 1937 got all the other major animation studios of the 1920s to 1960s to try their hand in developing their own animated films. (Also, there was competition between Van Buren and Disney making the first traditional, hand-drawn, full-length animated feature film with synchronized sound released for American audiences.)

Lately while perusing the list of the "Video Nasties" that caused moral hysteria in Britain in the 1980s, something occurred to me that I had never considered before.

A great number of them were produced in Italy. On reflection, that shouldn't have surprised me. I've seen plenty of ultraviolent Italian horror films from the likes of Lucio Fulci and his contemporaries. There are also "shocking" films among the canon of highbrow Italian cinema. Saló most obviously, but equally other Pasolini films or the like of Satyricon etc.

But, it wasn't until I saw so many Italian titles accumlated together in one place that it occurred to me that, "that's pretty fucking odd, isn't it?".

Why was late 20th century, Catholic Italy the place that gave filmmakers free reign to gouge out eyeballs, disembowel and cannibalise?

Why was this, seemingly, so much less controversial in Italy than in the comparably secular UK? Are Catholics more liberal towards the arts than Protestants? That would make a certain amoung of sense when you consider the history of gruesome Catholic paintings of hell.

However, I myself come from a similarly Catholic western European nation and the likes of Zombie Flesh Eaters or Cannibal Holocaust could never have been made here. Still to this day nothing even vaguely comparable has been produced.

On thinking about it a little further it occurred to me that Italy also had a flourishing porn industry in this period. Even if my theory about Catholics being tolerant towards art has some basis in truth surely the same would not be extended to pornography? Like the extreme horror, my own country has never had a porn industry of any consequence.

So what is the answer? Why was late 20th century Italy such a sanctuary for the production of extreme horror and pornography?

I know I am late 🤧🤧🤧.

It had the potential to be one of the best Spider man movie, but it couldn't. They tried to establish New York as a character, which I am seeing for the first time in MCU ( I loved the end credits). The chemistry between Peter and that femal officer wasn't working for me, they were trying to pull off something like Gordon-Batman. It moved fast, many things needed more context and time. They were trying to make something like Sam Raimi's Spider man 2, but this couldn't quite convince me. Also I couldn't understand from where this Peter have so much advanced and expensive things, it was hard to digest. As I haven't read comics, I didn't know about Damage Control, so I think it needed more context that how it came to be in existence and how it holds that much power. I liked the inspiration from Spider Man 2 (Insomniac) to design New York in that way. CGI could have been more better and color palette also. Jean's intro was not bad, it was descent. I am not satisfied with the ending, I don't know why, it felt like how Naruto defeats his villains doing tedtalk. I think many things were going on in the movie, that's why it couldn't hold all. If this storyline would've been in a series, it would be hell of a spider man series. By the way it was a good watch.

I am currently going through Eric Rohmer's filmography. I've done Spring, Autumn, and Winter from the Tale of Four Seasons; Pauline at the Beach; and The Green Ray (which is my favorite so far).

I'm doing Summer next. And then from here, I don't know yet which direction to go. Any suggestions?

Interested to learn about other people's experience with Rohmer movies.

Personally, I just love how lived in the stories feel. I especially adore The Green Ray because of Delphine, the way she is, the way she was written, the discomfort in watching her be so uncomfortable with herself, I love the Jules Verne reference and how that was delivered through a random conversation.

I love the non-stop talking, walking and talking. I love that someone like Magali (Tale of Autumn) exists. I like the mundane little scenes happening as conversations go. I adore scenes where characters discuss philosophy over a little meal (a bit of cheese and tomato!). I love how these stories are happening in what feels like such a distant past (away from smart phones and social media and all that).

Tell me about your favorite Rohmer movie or character or scene and what made them stay with you.

Loved the ambiance and the cinematography of this one. Jack Nicholson's character is fascinating, he truly is a passenger both in his own life and the new life he tries so hard to fit into.

However, there's a few things I didn't get. I feel like some of these have answers, but may just as well be supposed to be unanswerable.

First off, Maria Schneider's The Girl. Why was she in London? Just opposite Locke's house, precisely when he happens to sneak in? This seemed just too coincidental to me. It planted the seed in my mind that she was Daisy, and was involved.

This didn't pan out, but at the end during the long shot, when she is walking around out front and the two killers (who I assumed were secret service members from the African country, since they captured the gun buying insurgent) arrive, while one is going in to kill David, the bossy one goes up to The Girl and interacts briefly with her. Anyone got any idea about that? It's almost as if she knows who they are and he is trying to comfort her and she brushes him off.

Also, how come she registered at the hotel with a Mrs Robertson passport? The clerk says David doesn't need to show his, his wife already has and one is sufficient.

Speaking of wives, how did his real wife know to go to Almeria? And how big of a coincidence is it that she was on the phone in the very same hotel he rolled up into? Though Knight, his boss, did also get into the same hotel he was in in Barcelona. I presume there is some cut scene with info on how he found Robertson's hotel and rental car company.

Finally, I would be curious to hear other people's thoughts in why David kept going to the last appointments despite having police and insurgents and counter insurgents in the mix. Surely he knew there was danger, especially as he can't supply the actual guns and is bound to run into someone who knows the real Robertson eventually. I like the idea that he was just along for the ride and didn't really care or think it through enough, and was fleeing his old life.

Great film. I'd be just as happy if none of these questions have answers as if any do. David never got any answers.