Digger, Tom Cruise’s new climate change movie, is set to go the way of all the other climate change movies: into oblivion.
It is already a failure in box office terms, set to lose €245m for Warner Bros. The critics mostly hated it too, dismissing it as crude, loud, and hectoring. So at first glance, Alejandro G Iñárritu’s film is a critical and financial disappointment.
Climate is a tough topic to sell to the movie criterati: Don’t Look Up was apparently too didactic and its satire too scattergun; An Inconvenient Truth was derided as a filmed PowerPoint presentation, while The Day After Tomorrow was dismissed as alarmist fantasy.
Critics don’t like climate movies for the same reasons as the rest of us. They make us uneasy. There is a cognitive dissonance between our knowledge and beliefs around climate change and our behaviour, and we don’t like being reminded of it.
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And since we can’t attack the message of these films, we attack the script, or the acting, or the cast – especially if any of them owns a private jet.
Climate communicators have spent 40 years trying to solve the challenge of crafting messages that do not antagonise, or provoke a defensive response, but instead inspire, engage, and motivate.
For all this time, we have been more or less flailing around, trying to find the perfect framing, the right metaphor, the searing image, the magic words that will make the general public care more about what’s happening to the global climate.
I believe Digger could well turn out to be the messiah of climate communications we have been waiting for. Already, there has been a mini-backlash against the initial negative response of the mainstream movie critics, with publications such as Wired, the New York Times and the Guardian arguing that the movie is a misunderstood masterpiece.
[ Opinion: Reports on extreme weather fail to acknowledge climate crisisOpens in new window ]
Let me explain why. First a semi-spoiler alert: the film has a high-concept plot twist after about 15 minutes, so skip to the end if you don’t want to know more about this.
The title character of Digger is a “good ole boy” oil tycoon. His house is festooned with animal horns and antlers. He wears cowboy boots with his pyjamas. His Stetson is never far from his hand. So far, so stereotypical: he’s like The Hillbillies meets J.R. Ewing.
He’s taking a video call from an employee on an oil rig on the Greenland ice sheet. There’s a problem, and if there’s something Digger hates more than problems, it’s environmental problems. There’s a crack in the ice, but Digger instructs him to keep on drilling.
Suddenly, we step outside the scene, and realise that what we have been watching is actually a rehearsal for a play called Fossil Fools, based on an environmental catastrophe which occurred over 20 years previously.
This is where the real artistry of the movie as a piece of climate communication lies. We see the broad, caricature-like story of, you know, the usual: greedy oil barons, corrupt politicians, nuke-mad generals, and wild-eyed evangelicals who equate “oil” with “freedom” and “America”.
But we also get a critique of this broad-brush approach. When the actors step out of their Fossil Fools roles, they debate the characters they’re playing. Cruise’s character laments that Digger is shown as a clown in Wild West cosplay, when in reality he was a “composed, frightening, seductive psychopath”.
In another scene, Digger gives a speech to a UN/EU-type body, arguing that we don’t really want oil companies to stop drilling because we are addicted to the lifestyles fossil fuels make possible.
The blaming, demonising, and othering of the fossil fuel industry is tempting and cathartic, but leaves out both our own complicity and their humanity.
Later, in another “meta” sequence, the actors and director of Fossil Fools debate whether a scene in the play is historically accurate, and whether the play is a drama, a satire, a farce, or a comedy. The funder of the play intervenes to ask: “What does it matter? You’re both right. We’re all right. Now what?”
This resonated with me as a critique of the endless definitional debates among the climate movement. Is climate merely a scientific issue? A class issue, a gender issue? An environmental issue, a moral issue, or an economic problem related to the market? It’s all of the above. We’re all right. Now what?
Digger operates on three levels (at least!). There is the hinted-at story of the original environmental trauma caused by Rockwell Oil’s drilling in the Arctic; there’s Fossil Fools, the broad, unsubtle play that lambasts Digger and his generation of old, oil-addicted men for the catastrophe that followed, and there are the scenes in which we step outside the play to critique it. Each of these levels offers opportunities to think and talk about the climate crisis in new ways.
[ Two thumbs up for Tom Cruise in Digger. Also, two thumbs downOpens in new window ]
Digger also offers a critique of the role of climate science. Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, a scientist with Rockwell Oil. We suspect his bona fides when we learn he formerly worked for the US EPA, but he comes good later on when he delivers a series of truth bombs to the US president and others. Once again, Iñárritu delivers nuance instead of caricature.
Ganesh is key to a pivotal scene, during which Digger and the president discuss managing perceptions and controlling the narrative as the environmental disaster unfolds. Perception is everything here, says Digger, perception is reality.
No, says Ganesh. Perception is not reality. Reality is reality, and he drops a vase to show that gravity works no matter how we perceive, construct, or characterise it. The same is true of the ineluctable physics of climate change. The processes of global warming do not care what we call them, how we measure them, or how we frame them.
It’s a powerful moment in a powerful movie.
If the reports from the entertainment media in the US and internationally can be believed, Tom Cruise is baffled, humiliated, angry and blaming all around him for Digger’s failure to win an audience.
Alternatively, he is deeply proud of his work and doggedly defending what the film tried to do.
It seems even his well-oiled PR machine has failed to control the narrative on this.
But if we can choose what to believe, a remark he made on the On Film podcast aired the day the film opened might be one to embrace.
It suggests he knew he could be taking a chance with this movie.
“When I am making [movies], I’m not going, ‘Opening weekend!’ I feel very much like we’re going to make something that is a lasting piece of cinema,” he said.
Iñárritu was equally reflective. “This is a film about storytelling,” he said.
“If you could control the narrative, if you convince people of what you think and if you made them believe what you believe even if it’s not really accurate with reality...” he mused.
As the UN climate summit, Cop31, approaches, politicians, campaigners, scientists and policymakers will once again be forced to grapple with what is a tough topic to sell to the wider public.
Despite the narrowing gap between the make-believe of disaster movies and the real-life climate catastrophes happening in our world, it is a classic line from another Tom Cruise movie that perhaps best sums up the dilemma.
“I want the truth,” his US Navy lawyer character demands from his commanding officer in A Few Good Men.
Without missing a beat, his autocratic superior confidently replies: “You can’t handle the truth.”
Dr David Robbins is Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University
