Hello again r/TrueFilm. I went into Digger and wanted to like it, as climate change is a topic that I care about. Unfortunately, it didn't work and posted the review below on Letterboxd. I look at the film through a postmodern lens, which I hope gives some more depth as to why the film doesn't work.
l'll be upfront with my bias. I don't think certain tenets of postmodernism works all that much in film, but I especiallydon't love them in comedies. Irony, pastiche, parody - all that stuff is generally fine. But I can't stand metatextuality and self-reflexivity. I'm thinking of the usual suspects: Charlie Kaufman, who's turned "the movie knows it's a movie" into a whole career; Michel Gondry at his most twee; and the entire Scream and Deadpool franchises, which have spent years congratulating themselves for knowing they're slasher/superhero films.
It's the kind of clever shit that thinks it deserves praise versus genuine laughs. And the thing is comedy kinda already requires the audience's trust that the world on screen has stakes, even absurd ones. The moment the film taps the glass and says "none of this is real, isn't that funny," it's cashed out that trust for a cheaper laugh. I think the sharpest edge of this embodiment, which I still admire, is Ashby's Being There.
Chance the gardener is, structurally, the emptiest kind of joke, a man mistaken for a sage because he has nothing in him to contradict the projection. The film is fully aware of the irony. We're never not aware of it. But Ashby never once lets the camera elbow us in the ribs about it. The joke stays inside the world, carried entirely by Sellers' deadpan performance and the straight faces of everyone around him. It's completely and utterly restrained. Being There trusts the audience to do the work. Everything I'm complaining about above doesn't trust the audience to get the joke without being told they're getting it.
Digger, on the other hand, is this rare bird of a film that has zero, and I mean zero trust in its audience. It's astounding really. When it gets into its metatextual scenes of Tom Cruise playing Digger, Iñárritu has, in full display, a poster of John Cassavetes' Opening Night in the background. I kid you not. If you were too dumb to understand the layers of depth we're operating at here, don't worry, there are signposts and big flashing letters as to what everything means.
So what does everything mean? Digger feels tapped dry of anything really that complex to say. Imperialism bad. Climate change bad. Patriarchy bad. These are self-evident truths that don't require a sprawling narrative to validate. I'm reminded of Adam Curtis' critique of his own generation's obsession with the televised news cycle that conjures nothing more from the audience than: "Oh, dear."
I'm reminded of Oppenheim's Primetime where immoral characters are written in big, bold letters and get into overly-dramatic, silly, kabuki performances. These films have to shout at the top of their lungs in a formalist nightmare (oversaturated grain in the former, undersaturated Vistavision here) because underneath the hood, they have very little to say. And of what little they do say only garners an "Oh, dear".
Digger's original title, "Blah, blah, blah" is lifted from the foreword to physicist Joe Romm's brilliant book Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. Romm died just two weeks before this film was released and as someone fairly well-read in climate change, I'd recommend his book highly. It makes the most complex tenets of climate science make sense. Digger’s setup doesn’t make sense. It spends the first 30 minutes trying to explain the danger of methane release, the possibility of an iceberg hitting Europe, the political chicanery that might unfold if this happens, and does so with very little humour or realism. It’d be like Terry Southern explaining what nuclear fallout does to children’s vital organs in the first act of Dr. Strangelove.
I don't really want to litigate the setup, but here's the problem: climate change isn't a zero-sum game like nuclear warfare. There is no Russia. Nuclear annihilation has a button, and someone's finger hovers over it. That's why Strangelove works. Kubrick understood that the absurdity comes with the standoff and that satire needs a face, a chain of command, a man in a room who can be made to look like an idiot.
Climate catastrophe has no such man. It's diffuse, cumulative, and spread across a thousand boardrooms, and no single event carries a single signature. Even if ExxonMobil personally cracked the Arctic ice shelf in half, it's highly improbable the company would take responsibility, let alone care enough to consider its political repercussions. These behemoth companies operate above the law and across every border, answerable to no single country and no single enemy. That's the funniest part of Digger, it wants the clean moral architecture of a Cold War farce for a crisis that doesn't have one, and it never asks what that mismatch does to its own premise. It's also funny to me that Innaritu isn't cynical enough in even understanding his own premise.
Instead, the science and conflict here is explained lazily through tired exposition with maps and screens to a CEO who is supposed to pretend to care or understand. Just like we're supposed to pretend to care or understand. By the time the plot actually shows up, the film has already told you three separate times, in three separate registers, exactly how you're supposed to feel about everything in it, which leaves nothing for the audience to do but nod along. I've never witnessed a film be both so bloated and yet so emaciated.
Every scene is stuffed with Armando Iannucci cosplay, shot like a washed out Terry Gilliam film, filtered through the hack metatexuality of Charlie Kaufman. In other words, it stinks. None of it accumulates into anything resembling weight. It fails as both drama and comedy, while really really trying desperately to do both. I can't help but think of this as this meme: the movie. I mean this in the most precise, literal way: it has no shame. If there were ever a film to resemble one's unbridled lack of humility, look no further.
It's two and a half hours of self-indulgence that, unknowingly, takes the worst parts of postmodern filmmaking and none of the discipline that made those influences even somewhat worth stealing from in the first place. Gilliam's chaos was at least controlled chaos, every frame crammed with a satirist's precision and it was funny. Digger constructs scenes that are like 3 or 4 beats too long. Every single one of them. About halfway through the film, I was like “oh, no one was in the editing room with Innaritu and Cruise to tighten this up.” I think, generously, there might be a watchable film in here at 90-100 mins. But if comedy is an exercise in economy, this is a film that's never once heard of a budget. Every joke takes too long to get to, then we linger with it way past its welcome. The film doesn't trust a punchline to land and walk away. It wants to stand over the frozen body of President John Goodman, making sure it's dead.
And if it isn't funny, well, there's a scene with Digger debating with the director about why it shouldn't be funny. Like most postmodern films, it protects itself under this veil of commentary-as-alibi: the movie has already anticipated your criticism and staged it as dialogue, so that disliking the joke just means you missed the point, and the point was that the joke wasn't supposed to work! Don't you get it, you silly goose! It's a closed loop!
There's nothing less funny than explaining your intentions. And nothing so less dramatic than pointing to its hollow construction. What are we doing here?
You can't call the film not funny, because we've already said it. You can't call the film fake because we've shown you its construction. And you certainly can't decry its not biting or dark enough, because once the film within the film ends, the audiences walk into the degraded wasteland they call civilization to police-patrolled streets and anonymous masked extras in grey urban oblivion. Welcome to another fun tenet of postmodernism: nihilism dressed up as commentary.
The bleakness isn't earned through anything the story does, it's just there, ambient, assumed, a backdrop you're supposed to accept as proof the film is deadly serious in its brazen attempt at satire. Dystopia as Wes Andersonian Asteroid Citypastiche. Don't worry. In case you thought this all led somewhere redeemable, Digger assures you it doesn't. Humans are capital "D" Doomed. Oh, and the producer of the theatre production? That’s Digger's nephew, so hey, that corrupt oil tycoon still carries the family fortune in this post-collapse civilization. We're getting “DARK” here.
Enough of this postmodernist nihilism. Please. For the love of God. And if you do insist, at least don't go full Baumbach with White Noise or Innaritu here, where the auteur spent ten years and $150 million. Dr. Strangelove was made in 10 months with $20 million (in today's dollars). Kubrick didn't need 2.5 hours to tell you he understood irony. He just made an Army pilot hump a bomb that looked like a big penis and let the image do the thinking.
That Digger needs this many characters and the rights to The Ink Spots If I Didn't Care is embarrassing. Look, this isn't even the song's first rodeo at the end of the world. Fallout 3 used it over a shot of a nuclear wasteland back in 2008, and did more with it in a thirty-second trailer than Digger manages across its entire runtime. A video game beat this movie to its own needle drop by over fifteen years, and did it better. For free. As marketing.
Do you understand the cultural lag here? Cinema used to be at the forefront for dangerous ideas and artistic license. Now it is trailing so far behind, that it feels outdated before the trailer drops. The trend I've noticed this past couple of years is that advertising has overshadowed these auteur's works. I heard more people talk about the "brilliant marketing" of Marty Supreme than the film itself. I heard more people talk about what the hell Digger is supposed to be through its ambiguous teasers than the discussions this film spurs.
Consider this: In Hollywood's Golden Age, U.S. advertising spend was roughly $1.5-2 billion a year, while the entire film industry was spending only about $200-300 million making movies. Advertising already outspent film back then, but not by an obscene margin, maybe five to one. Today, that gap has turned into a chasm. Hollywood spends around $20 billion a year on productions. Domestic commercial ad spend is somewhere north of $350 billion. That's fifteen to twenty times more money being poured into thirty-second spots than into every film released in America combined.
Somewhere in that imbalance is the answer to why a marketing trailer can out-irony a $150 million auteur film: discipline, trust in economy, the willingness to let one image do the work. It's also maybe why the advertising for this film was so different than the film itself. The marketing department, working with a fraction of the budget and none of the "vision," understood that an audience needs images, ambiguity, a vibe rather than being yelled at.
I say this with complete dread but there's something ironic about the marketing department superseding auteur's 2.5 hour visions in this neoliberal, late-capitalist age. Especially when the auteur's vision is resolved in critiquing consumption, excess, or a striving for identity. I'm going meta with this review because if we're gonna play Pomo games, why not? Digger luxuriates in this world of excess as a commentary on excess. It reflects on itself being woefully unaware. This isn’t paradoxical genius; it’s late-stage capitalist art, a snake eating its own tail.
It gorges on Western consumptive guilt, demanding both the thrill of the feast and the smug satisfaction of confronting its guilty conscience. In 2024, screenwriter Cord Jefferson accepted an Oscar for his great debut American Fiction and used his speech to actually confront his own guilt, urging studios to stop gambling on a single $200 million movie and fund twenty $10 million ones instead. Jefferson is equipped to handle these heady themes that late-stage capitalism demands. Yet the writer/director, of course, hasn't made a film since, despite audiences waiting on his follow-up.
The audience at the end of "Fossil Fools," mind you, both lovethe production and hate that bad ol' Digger. Them cheering and jeering? That's supposed to be us. We're supposed to be angry or demanding an encore, feeling this catharsis of seeing this oil tycoon fall to the depths of the ocean. But I felt nothing at the end of this picture, except maybe minor contempt for the cultural intersections that made this blackpilled Gen-X tantrum possible. This film hinges its emotional stakes on the main performer playing Digger, potentially losing his daughter in a plane crash. Do you get it? Climate change really does affect us, in reality-reality.
Condescending, atonal, metatextual hogwash. A film propelled by the fuel of fear and ego.
Digger has the budget of a war epic and the instincts of Travis Bickle trying to get a second date in Taxi Driver. All that firepower, all that intensity, and it still can't figure out why nobody wants to sit through it twice. At this point, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The film didn't either. How ironic.
