Digger: The Costs Of Doing Business

Spoilers ahead

On the surface, Digger is another political satire about the climate crisis, in a similar style to 2021’s Don’t Look Up or 2025’s Mickey 17. It follows the titular Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon and one of the most powerful men in the world, as he and the US government race to prevent a natural disaster brought about by his oil drilling operations.

The film is far from subtle in how it presents its satire, not least in its larger-than-life characters. Played by a near unrecognisable Tom Cruise, Digger is a loud-mouthed, abrasive Texan, not used to taking no for an answer and believing that all problems can be solved if they just ‘keep on digging’.

In the film’s opening scenes, his employees repeatedly try to warn him about the impending disaster; a methane leak beneath his Greenland oil rig that has caused an ice shelf to split apart. These warnings have been coming in for weeks but Digger has paid them little attention, focusing instead on keeping his sickly, 30-year old cat alive. A clear metaphor for how real-world oil companies have buried their heads in the sand about the destructive effects of their operations.

The other standout character is Digger’s environmental safety chief, Dr Ganesh, played by the always exceptional Riz Ahmed. Ganesh is constantly pulled between doing his job of telling these powerful men the hard truth, but also fearing losing his position for telling them things they don’t want to hear.

This of course parallels real-life scientists brought before the many climate conferences over the years, but is also a stark reminder of the tight-rope unsuccessfully walked by many government scientists during the Covid pandemic, where late action led to thousands of deaths.

This entire opening sequence has an uncanny quality to it. The performances and writing are very theatrical. The sets and props have an artificiality about them (especially Digger’s grotesque pet cat). But the film is not as it appears. Like them or not, these seemingly strange creative choices are intentional.

About 25 minutes into the film a very jarring reveal occurs; all the events we have seen so far are in fact a technical rehearsal of a satirical play called “Fossil Fools.”

The play-within-a-film story was intentionally kept hidden during the film’s marketing and may explain why many critics and audience members have been left dissatisfied. Even the reason behind this narrative choice only makes sense over an hour later. in the film’s climax. It does make for a confusing watch at times but I would argue that this does pay-off in the end.

Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger in the play, finally snaps and voices his disagreement with the “historical accuracy” of the production and that he finds the whole comedic tone to be in poor taste, especially given that his own daughter is currently missing due to a storm caused by climate change. It is only then that the play’s producer steps forward and reveals all.

The producer is in fact Kenny Rockwell, the nephew of Digger, who was a real person within the world of the film. The events being portrayed in the play all occurred about 20 years in the past and “Fossil Fools” is a semi-fictionalised retelling of the worldwide catastrophe. And the play has proved an immense hit with the audiences that survived.

When questioned why he would portray his own uncle in such a negative light, Kenny explains that he saw first this play as a minimalist production with only three actors playing all the parts. Despite this, when Digger finally died at the end of the play, the whole audience stood up and cheered. Recognising the power of the story, Kenny then bought the rights to the play and has gone on to stage this, the biggest-budget version of it that he could create. All in the name of allowing the survivors to have a healthy way to process their collective grief and trauma.

On the surface, the Rockwell family providing this outlet to vent their grief and anger towards Digger seems like an act of accountability and a promise to change their ways. However, by owning and staging “Fossil Fools”, they are controlling the narrative. Just as Digger himself tried to do many years prior, in order to escape sole blame and responsibility for the disaster.

All the play does is provide a shallow catharsis in depicting Digger’s death and mocking the other powerful men who helped him flood the Earth. It does not call for radical action or come to any revolutionary conclusions required to prevent a similar disaster in the future. In reality it is just another way for the Rockwell family to continue profiting off the legacy of their own destruction.

The Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht warned about this very phenomenon. Working in his native Germany during the rise of fascism throughout the 1920s-30s, Brecht developed a number of theatrical techniques that were designed to deliberately alienate his audiences from the events portrayed onstage. In particular, many of his politically-charged plays lacked a sense of catharsis in the climax, e.g. the lovers finally get married, the villain is defeated, etc.

Brecht instead aimed to distance the audience from the play’s story in a way that would make them think consciously about the scenes playing out before their eyes. He wanted them to be active participants in the process rather than as passive, subconscious observers. His hope being that the mainly working-class audiences would similarly become actively involved in the class struggle outside the auditorium.

Brecht called this the “alienation effect” and his plays would often feature fourth wall breaks, where actors addressed the audience, stage hands coming onto the stage in an obvious way and exposed rigging and set supports.

I’d argue that Digger takes a similar approach, albeit without any call for class struggle. Rather than play the main narrative as a standard satire on the climate crisis, instead it draws attention to the artificiality of the story and engages the audience in a more active way. Jarring us abruptly early on, keeping us distanced from the narrative and in a deliberately dissatisfied, confused state. And pointing to the shortcomings of satire in a world that is becoming increasingly more contradictory.

At around the film’s midpoint, Digger is seen addressing a furious European parliament in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. He begins his speech by taking responsibility, but then goes on to also blame the politicians present, as well as everyone in wider society for being jointly responsible, due to their lifestyles’ reliance on oil. His argument is that all he does is provide a supply for the demand they have created. And that in spite of the destruction brought about, they will keep coming to him for more.

Real-life oil executives and corporations have been making the same excuses for decades. It is also true that politicians are jointly culpable for climate change. As we see earlier in the film, the US President pulled a lot of strings to allow Digger to set up oil rigs in both Greenland and Alaska, including withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords (just as Doanld Trump did in 2020 and again in 2026).

Establishment politicians are servants of the capitalist class and will do anything in their power to keep the system afloat, even at the expense of our planet’s environment. This scene takes on even more significance whenever we later learn that the Rockwell family are producing the play and as the speech goes unchallenged it acts as propaganda for them to continue avoiding responsibility long after the effects have taken hold.

It is therefore unfortunate and ironic to hear the film’s director, Alejandro Iñárritu voicing some of these very talking points in a recent interview; “I’m not interested in pointing fingers or reducing the film to a political commentary or a right or left thing. I’m trying, through Digger’s speech, to say that we are all part of this madness. That there are no good people or bad people. The system has trapped all of us, and we have to find a way out together.”

It is true that moralising alone will not be enough to solve the climate crisis (although I would disagree that there are no “bad people” involved). This is a systemic issue, brought about by the internal logic and contradictions of the capitalist system that prioritises short-term profit motives ahead of all other considerations, including the destruction of the planet we all live on.

Claiming that someone driving their car to work is as responsible as the billionaire oil tycoons deliberately destroying our environment is buying into the very propaganda they have been sowing for decades. Much like Digger’s nephew in the film, real world capitalists are masters at controlling the narrative.

It was the oil corporations who suppressed the initial scientific evidence about global warming when it first emerged in the 1970s. It is they who have tried to shift the blame onto the consumer, rather than the ones profiting from pollution. They successfully made it an issue of individual responsibility rather than a systemic capitalist problem; such as through encouraging us to recycle home waste and monitor our own carbon footprint.

Meanwhile the real-life Diggers continue to extract fossil fuels at a higher rate than ever before, while living incredibly wasteful lifestyles flying across the globe in private jets.They don’t seem to be too concerned about their own carbon footprints.

We even see this in the world of the film. In spite of the hellish state of the world, the Rockwell family still have the financial security to stage a state-of-the-art theatrical production depicting the very global catastrophe that they helped cause. Even a world-altering event was not enough to fully shake their grip on wealth and power.

The in-film audience’s cathartic reaction to Digger’s death, is immediately cut short by a “Level 4” safety warning, in which all the audience members put on gas masks and silently exit the theatre. They emerge into the post-apocalyptic hellscape of a flooded city, patrolled by heavily armed soldiers and robots.

During the credits, the same safety warning is loudly played through the cinema speakers cutting short the film audio, as if we ourselves are about to walk out into the aftermath of Digger’s destruction. This was a chilling end to the film and most likely intended as a warning of what could come to pass in our own world.

Overall, I found Digger to be a well-crafted meditation on the role of satire and how even art that seems to criticise the ruling class can be hijacked by those very capitalists for their own nefarious reasons. If films alone could wake us all up to change the world then we would have solved this crisis long ago.

But we do need to rid ourselves of this foolish notion that we are all equally responsible and so must work together to solve this crisis. Capitalist oil tycoons have no interest in that. Not until the earth runs dry or the climate has deteriorated to the point that it seriously affects their profit margins. As Iñárritu correctly identifies, it is the system at fault.

There is only one solution: we workers must unite to abolish that system and remove the profiteers at its wheel. And we must do so before it’s too late.