Digger and the age of Tom Cruise
CAMRI’s Alexander Sergeant has written for The Conversation on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger, arguing that its attempted satire of climate catastrophe, corporate power and ageing male authority is compromised by its own starring vehicle: Tom Cruise.
In “Digger tries to mock powerful older men – but can’t escape 64-year-old millionaire Tom Cruise”, Sergeant considers the unusual cultural position Cruise occupies after more than four decades as one of Hollywood’s most durable and recognisable stars. He suggests that audiences may eventually remember recent history not only through events such as the post-Cold War settlement, 9/11 or the financial crash, but through Cruise’s continually evolving screen image.
Digger casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate overseeing a hazardous drilling operation in Greenland as a broader global crisis develops. The film uses the scenario to target complacent elites, extractive capitalism and political inadequacy in the face of climate emergency. Yet Sergeant argues that the film’s satirical force is weakened by its reluctance to confront the tensions surrounding Cruise’s own celebrity persona.
Star image and contradiction
Sergeant’s article places Cruise’s career alongside changing political and media conditions. From the consumerist world of Rain Man and Jerry Maguire, through the surveillance anxieties of Minority Report and the post-9/11 paranoia of the Mission: Impossible films, Cruise has remained a prominent cinematic presence during profound social and technological change.
In Digger, Cruise appears under extensive prosthetics and make-up, presenting an ageing, grotesque version of masculine power. Sergeant identifies an irony in this transformation: the film invites viewers to observe Cruise becoming physically diminished on screen while maintaining an almost unnaturally ageless public image off screen. The contrast is especially striking given the actor’s recent action-star promotion and his continuing association with extreme physical performance.
The film also creates a potentially revealing clash between fiction and celebrity. Digger’s wealth, private-jet travel and indifference to the consequences of fossil-fuel extraction could have offered a sharper interrogation of elite consumption and climate responsibility. Instead, Sergeant argues, the film uses Cruise’s presence primarily to distance its fictional tycoon from the actor’s real-world image rather than critically examine the relationship between the two.
Satire without bite?
For Sergeant, the problem is not simply that Digger is a broad or extravagant satire. Its difficulty is that it seems excessively concerned with signalling its own cleverness. The film asks audiences to adopt an ironic, knowing distance from its artificiality, but this self-consciousness prevents it from treating climate breakdown, political failure or the power of entrenched wealth with either comic precision or emotional seriousness.
The result, he suggests, is a climate satire that struggles to produce either genuine laughter or urgency. It stages the collapse of political and corporate authority without finding a sufficiently forceful perspective on the structures it seeks to criticise. As a study of Cruise’s star image, it similarly avoids some of the questions that might make the film more unsettling: celebrity, wealth, masculinity, image management and the cultural authority of powerful older men.
Read the article
Read Alexander Sergeant’s full analysis, “Digger tries to mock powerful older men – but can’t escape 64-year-old millionaire Tom Cruise”, in The Conversation.
Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash
