Early reviews for Tom Cruise’s Digger have drawn parallels with Leonardo DiCaprio’s polarizing Oscar-nominated movie. The upcoming film is directed by Academy Award winner Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Ahead of its theatrical debut, Digger has failed to impress critics who can’t help but compare it with 2021’s Don’t Look Up. The Netflix movie was a comedy, focusing on climate change, similar to Cruise’s new project. But it didn’t win over many critics. Currently, it holds an average Tomatometer score of 56% on Rotten Tomatoes.
However, Don’t Look Up did earn four nominations at the 2022 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score.
Why critics keep making the same climate-change satire comparison
Digger focuses on Cruise’s character, the most powerful man in the world, who attempts to save mankind from a disaster that he unleashed.
The full plot details are still under wraps, but the film mainly throws light on climate change in a satirical manner. It appears many critics are not in awe of how the movie treats its subject matter.
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter mentions that Digger also fails to make an impact just like DiCaprio’s movie. He called it “a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous. Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check.”
Rooney described the movie as “a heavy-handed cataclysm scenario built around the blunt point that any attempt to halt global warming this late in the game is pure political theater.”
Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote that Cruise’s film “wants to be the Dr. Strangelove of climate change. It also wants to be the network of climate change and to radically up the ante on Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s finger-pointing satire of climate change.”
He added, “the film is saying that the situation we face is so dire, so on the precipice of disaster, that if you watch this movie and somehow fail to embrace its ‘visionary’ message of apocalypse now, you’re contributing to the problem.’
Robert Daniels of Roger Ebert wrote, “One could interpret Digger as Iñárritu’s critique of movies like Don’t Look Up, smug works that self-righteously proclaim the exactitude of their political satire without any discernible complications.”
Digger’s cast also features Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, and more.
Warner Bros. Pictures’ Digger hits theaters on October 2, 2026.
