New Trump-era movie is mind-bending, pretentious and a total box office bomb

In the age of President Donald Trump, a man who dismisses man-made climate change as "the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world" and actively pushes expert scientists out of the government, the world needs a great mainstream climate change movie.

Instead, with "Digger," we only get a very good movie. The one great climate change movie was released more than two decades ago.

Two years ago, I wrote a Salon retrospective on the 2004 blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow," one in which I lamented the fact that it was the only Hollywood blockbuster to ever focus explicitly on climate change as its antagonist. I'd written about that movie before (and would do so again later), both because I respect its historical significance and because I find it wildly entertaining, but only in 2024 did I get to interview its director, Roland Emmerich. His words about the movie's significance resonate with me to this day.

"As far as the film's legacy is concerned, it was ahead of its time and now is perceived as prophetic," Emmerich explained. "There should be more movies and TV shows on climate change, so we need more stories tackling this urgent and important concern. Every bit helps to show people that this is going to happen. Art can wake up people, especially whenever it is an end-of-the-world scenario about life and death, where the stakes are really high, so it intensifies and heightens everything. You have to frighten people to usher in change. This is what the film aims to accomplish."

Enter "Digger." As with "The Day After Tomorrow," I respect the movie's political message. At a time when Hollywood shies away from discussing climate change except indirectly ("Interstellar") or through allegory ("Don't Look Up"), "Digger" is a $180 million passion project, a giant gamble that critics and audiences will be persuaded by its attempt to chastise humanity about climate change with a labyrinthine narrative, state-of-the-art special effects and an all-star cast led by Tom Cruise. Also like "The Day After Tomorrow," "Digger" can be described as prophetic. But it is a flawed movie and, in many essential respects, inferior to "The Day After Tomorrow."

Yet in its own way, for the right audience, it is also wildly entertaining. And at this point spoilers follow, so be warned. I can't discuss "Digger" with the depth it deserves unless I divulge key plot points.

"Digger" is a matryoshka doll of a motion picture.

Like the famous Russian nesting dolls (or matryoshka dolls) in which progressively smaller figurines are placed inside larger ones, "Digger" has a complicated story in which there is more than meets the eye. On the surface, it tells the story of the titular character Digger Rockwell (Cruise), an oilman who ignores multiple warnings from scientists about the impact of his drilling in Greenland and winds up plunging the world into ecological disaster. (Worth noting: Trump is already trying to increase drilling for oil and mining for rare earth minerals in Greenland despite the rapid ice melt occurring there.) Because Digger is friends with the president (John Goodman), he is initially able to control the narrative about the impending calamity, and therefore proceeds in his stubborn ignorance to worsen the environmental calamity even as his expert advisers led by Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), try to reason with the men in power (all the leaders are male, which is not a coincidence).

That, at least, is the surface story. Near the end of the first act, the screenplay (intricately crafted by director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman based on a story by Berman, Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth) takes a radically unexpected turn. We realize that the story of Digger we have watched is actually a technically sophisticated play called "Fossil Fools," with Cruise and company playing actors depicting individuals who are nevertheless indeed quite real in this film's fictional universe.

This conceit is both the strength and weakness of "Digger." By making this a story about how to remember the individuals who literally destroyed our planet, rather than simply telling that same tale in a straightforward way, "Digger" allows itself to wax philosophical about myriad interesting subjects. The characters offer dueling perspectives on whether one should be literally truthful or comically satirical in depicting real-world tragedies. We are able to see not only the tipping point at which humanity's irresponsible business practices rendered our world borderline uninhabitable, but also the long-term social consequences of that same reckless behavior. In this clever fashion, Iñárritu is able to dive into the psyches of two sets of characters at two different points in time — the rationalizations and personalities of the individuals whose greed plunged us into chaos (both in the "Digger" universe and in our shared reality), yes, and also the billions of ordinary schlubs who have to endure the aftermath.

Yet this same characteristic distracts just as often as it engages. Much like Iñárritu's most famous pictures, 2014's "Birdman" and 2015's "The Revenant," "Digger" sometimes gets so bogged down in its style that it muddles one's ability to focus on the substance. The word "pretentious" is overused when describing art-house cinema, but it unfortunately is quite apt here. When Iñárritu encourages his cast to indulge in hammy monologues and cartoonish mugging, or believes bizarre jokes about dying cats and rectal cancer are somehow funny, he creates obstacles between the audience and their ability to be entertained — and, therefore, to be provoked into deeper thought about the dangers of man-made climate change.

"The Day After Tomorrow" is still the gold standard of fictional climate change cinema.

"The Day After Tomorrow," on the other hand, is refreshingly simple and linear. Emmerich and co-screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff used the skeleton of a disaster movie and added on top of it the flesh of a climate change awareness flick. While the science is not always correct (both men admitted to me that they prioritized telling a fast-paced adventure story over precise accuracy), the film is close enough to the truth that it raises awareness. Indeed, after its release, a survey by environmental science and policy expert Anthony Leiserowitz determined it "had a 'significant impact' on climate change risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions [and] policy priorities" among the roughly 21 million Americans who saw it in theaters.

I doubt "Digger" will have that impact. For one thing, it bombed at the box office, while "The Day After Tomorrow" was a hit. More important, though, is the fact that it simply doesn't have the zip, the drive, the momentum of "The Day After Tomorrow." The opening scene of that motion picture, which reenacts the real-life disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, far exceeds any of the action or special effects sequences in "Digger." There are long stretches where "Digger" is frankly boring, or, if one is to be generous, so slow-paced that it feels like the filmmakers are showing off rather than focusing on telling a good story. Even worse, for all of the film's sincere concern about climate change, the storytellers are more fixated on the depravities of the elites than on the suffering of their victims — many of whom, in one ugly scene centering on Cruise's character, are disingenuously blamed for needing oil to survive, a position that ignores their inability to change the economic system on which they depend.

"The Day After Tomorrow," by contrast, strikes an ideal balance between the two. It has characters clearly satirizing President George W. Bush and his administration, and they are effectively condemned while still depicted as three-dimensional human beings. (As I once joked with meteorologist Glenn "The Hurricane" Schwartz, perhaps the most unrealistic part of the movie was its analogue for Vice President Dick Cheney admitting he was wrong about something.) Importantly, it also has a compelling set of main characters dealing with identifiable problems like saving their families and doing their jobs even as the world is literally destroyed around them.

This brings me to one of my favorite clips from "The Day After Tomorrow," a moment in which Emmy Rossum's character, Laura Chapman, mourns the loss of modern human civilization due to a superstorm.

"Everything I've ever cared about, everything I've worked for... has all been preparation for a future that no longer exists," Rossum's Chapman says. "I know you always thought I took the competition too seriously... you were right. It was all for nothing."

Despite its admirable and grandiose ambitions, nothing in "Digger" ever achieves the simple eloquence and profundity of those lines. I can recommend "Digger" for its intellect, its intriguing plotting, its ability to anticipate the likely future and its unique visual style, but when it comes to being a timeless climate change parable (which it obviously aspires to be), it simply falls short. As far as climate change cinema is concerned, "The Day After Tomorrow" remains the gold standard.

(It's just a shame that the star of "The Day After Tomorrow," Dennis Quaid, wound up supporting Trump.)