‘Digger’ First Reactions: Cruise’s ‘Best Performance Since Magnolia’ in a Film Critics Cannot Agree On

One camp calls Inarritu’s apocalyptic satire one of the most audacious studio movies ever made. The other calls it a mess. Warner Bros. releases it October 2, and the divide is the story.

The first public verdict on Digger is that there is no verdict. After press screenings in New York and Los Angeles and a premiere underway in London, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s apocalyptic satire has split the people who saw it into camps that barely seem to have watched the same movie. One critic is calling it one of the most audacious studio films ever made. Another walked out calling it a mess.

That split is the story, because Digger is not a small bet. It is one of Warner Bros.‘ two major fall Oscar plays alongside Dune: Part Three, it carries a reported budget of $125 million before marketing, and it stars Tom Cruise in the kind of transformed, prosthetics-heavy character turn he has never attempted at this scale. Cruise, 64, has been nominated four times without a competitive win, and took home an Honorary Academy Award last year. This is his first role since stepping away from Mission: Impossible, and he is already on the campaign trail.

The film casts him as Digger Rockwell, an ostentatious oil tycoon in Dr. Strangelove mode who learns that his drilling operation in Greenland has released a catastrophic methane expulsion and dislodged an ice shelf that is now barreling toward Europe with tsunami potential. Riz Ahmed plays the scientist trying to make him understand it. Sandra Huller plays his irascible half-sister and business partner, John Goodman the dictatorial U.S. president, Michael Stuhlbarg the feckless vice president, and Jesse Plemons a mystery figure whose role comes into focus late. There is also a twist early in the film that reportedly upends the entire premise, and it is already proving as divisive as everything else.

The Raves

The praise, where it lands, lands enormous. Critic Jim Hemphill called it Cruise’s best performance since Magnolia and “one of the most visually inventive, conceptually audacious studio movies ever made.” Courtney Howard described it as “powder keg cinema” with Cruise giving “a brilliant, boldly invigorated, tour de force performance.” IndieWire’s Anne Thompson called it “a brave and gorgeous art film,” which is not a sentence often written about a nine-figure studio release.

Polygon’s Jacob Kleinman loved the film with a caveat that says a great deal about the ensemble: “Cruise is great, but he’s the least interesting actor onscreen.” Riz Ahmed’s performance is drawing some of the strongest individual notices of the first wave.

The Pans

The other camp is not hedging. Joey Magidson called the film “a mess,” adding that “not a whole lot works here” and that he simply did not enjoy it. Matt Neglia found Cruise’s turn his “most dynamic role in years” but said the film around him is “so imbalanced in favor of zany but empty theatrics” that it never digs deeper. Even critics in the middle share that structural complaint. Variety’s Clayton Davis wrote that “not all the dots connect” and wished the film leaned harder into its own absurdity, before offering the line that summarizes the whole evening: “the divide on this one is going to be wide.”

Why the Divide Was Predictable?

Nothing about Digger was built to be agreeable. Inarritu wrote it with his Birdman collaborators Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone alongside Sabina Berman, and Birdman was itself a film people argued about all the way to Best Picture. Emmanuel Lubezki, Inarritu’s longtime cinematographer and a three-time Oscar winner, shot it. Dennis Gassner designed its meticulously dreary end times. Cruise spent the production under heavy prosthetics, a process he says he worked down from six hours in the makeup chair to one.

An end-of-the-world satire about an oil baron, from a director who does not do restraint, starring the most famous movie star alive as a man oblivious to the collapse he caused, was always going to produce this exact spread of reactions. The question is whether the divide reads as a liability or as proof of life during awards season, where consensus films often fade and argued-about films stick around.

The Stakes

The commercial math is less philosophical. With marketing and campaign spend on top of the reported $125 million budget, the film reportedly needs upwards of $300 million worldwide to break even, and early tracking has its domestic opening in the high teens. Warner Bros. is releasing Digger wide on October 2, including IMAX and VistaVision engagements in several locations.

Where the Market Stands

The prediction market told this story before the embargo could. Through August and into mid-September, traders treated a comfortably fresh Tomatometer as the base case, with a score in the mid-70s holding steady as a coin flip. Then press started seeing the film, and the market did not hesitate. In the four days since the first screenings, the mid-70s contracts collapsed from that coin flip to a long shot, the fresh threshold flipped from near lock to clear underdog, and the whole price ladder slid toward a score hovering around the low 50s.

That is one of the sharpest single-week repricings a Rotten Tomatoes market has seen all season, and it is the detail worth sitting with. Divided first reactions usually keep a market choppy while the two camps trade against each other. This one moved in a straight line, down, which tells you which camp the money believes.

See where the full Digger Rotten Tomatoes market stands right now, updated live, on Kalshi.

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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