Tom Cruise is fantastic, but you might hate the film
uncertain
you → hate → film
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's dark comedy tells the story of an evil oil tycoon and the end of the world
Rise early.
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comedy → tell → world
Those words are etched into the wood on a mantel, in all caps, below a reverently displayed 10-cent shovel — a shovel that oil baron Digger Rockwell's grandfather purchased around the turn of the century and used to start the empire Digger himself now steers to global domination.
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Digger → etch → domination
As the film opens, Digger (Tom Cruise) stands next to it while screaming down a trio of his walleyed climate-expert subordinates about their general lack of resolve.
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Digger → open → resolve
He is delivering a diatribe for the ages about his grandfather's legendary work ethic, about toiling in the dust and the dirt and nearly dying under the blistering sun and — wait a second.
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He → deliver → sun
Why aren't they listening to his story?
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they → listen → story
The first being that the purpose of his tirade was to keep those experts from shutting down his oil rig in Greenland due to a widening crack in the ice shelf upon which it sits.
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it → keep → which
But as of a few minutes ago, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) explains, the crack itself ceased to be a problem.
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crack → explain → ?
The result is a smouldering methane explosion directly caused by Digger's willful negligence that is sure to, at least, raise a few eyebrows from the families of all those dead oil workers.
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that → smoulder → workers
The second reason no one feels like listening to Digger's personal history: U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) has just arrived, and will probably want to know why this accident now implicates him in a cascading climate catastrophe that could drown Norway — and that's just to start.
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that → feel → Norway
That's not to mention the ambitious, destabilizing narrative twist that elevates Alejandro G. Iñárritu's newest beyond-farcical fable into what it is — a surprise second strand to the story that, without giving away the game, has us questioning why we're watching this at all.
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we → mention → this
It suggests that Iñárritu and his audience are engaging in the same self-satisfied ritual that got us into this real-life mess in the first place.
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that → suggest → place
Of using high-minded entertainment to point out, and joke about, our impending doom, as if that alone is admirable.
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that → use → doom
As if that could change anything at all.
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that → change → anything
At least, that's what you could get from it.
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you → get → it
The winding, tongue-in-cheek story is typical Iñárritu in a way that makes its basic worldview feel self-evident: like the ego-destroying reckoning with our own insignificance in Biutiful; the fascinating futility of perseverance in The Revenant; or the vulnerable self-criticism against egotistical legacy-building in Birdman.
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worldview → make → Birdman
It’s all there as Digger freewheels between a madcap Cruise caring for his dying, 30-year-old corpse of a cat and screaming down pussy-footed eco-activists still blindly dependent on fossil fuels.
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Cruise → ’ → fuels
Or as he delivers self-aggrandizing, Shakespearean monologues about his own virility in a lecture hall inexplicably populated by mannequins in wigs.
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he → deliver → wigs
The story about a self-obsessed, self-mythologizing opportunist pillaging a dying planet for his own profits unravels into something stranger, more confusing, more barbed and angry and ultimately defeatist.
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story → obsess → something
Digger is a comedy in the way one could find their own funeral funny.
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funeral → find → way
Explaining exactly why would probably be a mistake (though we can confirm this is unequivocally not a musical).
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this → explain → ?
Without quite getting close to M. Night Shyamalan territory, going in blind to Digger’s actual format is probably for the best.
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going → get → best
(For example, revealing how Jesse Plemons’s red-haired Svengali fits into all this would probably spoil the fun.)
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Svengali → reveal → fun
Because the befuddling delight in discovering exactly how Iñárritu has chosen to make his demoralizing point about where we’re all headed is one of the movie’s few uplifting spots.
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we → discover → spots
Suffice it to say, this and Birdman — Iñárritu's Oscar-winning 2014 examination of a man at war with his pathetic and inescapable impulse to matter — share serious DNA.
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this → suffice → DNA
And without the reprieve offered by the surprise reveal, the rotating cast of idiot oligarchs, preening politicians and sad-eyed scientists steering the Earth straight off a cliff in search of endless profits would be a bit too on-the-nose.
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cast → offer → nose
Which is not to mention the stilted, infinitely self-aware style — anyone who felt Wes Anderson fell a little too in love with his own schtick in the relentlessly obscure Asteroid City should probably steer clear of this one.
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Anderson → mention → one
Digger is built for smug unpacking and film-critic scene analyses — "inaccessible," "artifice" and "up-its-own" are the three descriptors you could most readily use to describe it.
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you → build → it
Alienatingly ambitious, as is often seen in works by esteemed directors late in their careers, Iñárritu's latest does perform like a riddle he expects you to solve.
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you → see → riddle
A uniformly colour-graded cartoon for pretentious, beige-loving children, the film's deliberate mix of vomit humour and metaphor-laden philosophizing seems to scream all three descriptions at you the whole time.
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mix → grade → you
Imagine Megalopolis if it was, somehow, actually good.
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it → imagine → Megalopolis
REVIEW
Megalopolis is one of the worst big-budget movies ever made
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Megalopolis → make → movies
Video
Asteroid City is a masterful puzzle — and likely to be Wes Anderson fans' most hated movie
Which raises the question of why Tom Cruise would want to take this project on.
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Cruise → hat → project
The 64-year-old actor's last movie that wasn’t a franchise-focused blockbuster came nearly a decade ago: 2017’s American Made.
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that → focus → ?
The last time he made such an obviously transgressive and politically relevant movie was — being generous — 2007's Lions for Lambs or 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July.
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he → make → July
Cruise is fascinating here, delivering searing, complex, southern-inflected line after line, reminding you that he was once one of the most talented and interesting leading men in Hollywood.
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he → deliver → Hollywood
enter the critical limelight with this, a movie that seems to intentionally attack the current U.S. administration?
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that → enter → administration
Especially when he chose to avoid criticizing that same government when it proposed instituting tariffs designed to limit American productions' abilities to film abroad — a move that could easily have tanked his globetrotting Mission: Impossible series?
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that → choose → series
Maybe Digger allows Cruise to have his cake and eat it, too.
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Cruise → allow → it
Maybe the meta turn later on allows him to do something that equally doomeristic films like Don’t Look Up, Silent Night, Greenland or even the upcoming Musk documentary can’t.
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films → allow → Look
…and 8 more, not listed.
The Aporia
