Digger has much to say, but is it too overwhelming for most to enjoy?

I will be honest, most of the time reviews have a large impact on which movies I'll see in theaters. When I first saw the trailers for Digger I felt enthralled by the grand nature of how it was presented - larger than life, intriguing, and seriously out there. I told myself multiple times "I want to see that" ............. and then it released. 

Reviews were rough and split among those who felt it was a masterpiece and others who couldn't stand it. The Rotten Tomatoes score hovered in the 50's and the box office only returned $8 million in its opening weekend. Story and production aside, Digger is on track to lose hundreds of millions and cast a shadow on Tom Cruise's filmography. 

I felt split. Days after release we went to see Coyote vs Acme at 2:40 in the smallest auditorium in the theater; we had around 10 others in the showing. After it ended, we poked our heads into a showing of Digger at 5PM in the theaters largest auditorium. It was empty. Not a single soul. At this point I was feeling discouraged - watching it on streaming discouraged. It was a few days later seeing a headline on TV about it's box office losses that I texted a friend. He saw it. He loved it. In fact he was emphatic about it. This was enough to bring enough enthusiasm back that I bought a ticket. 

Wow, this is quite the film. Warning spoilers ahead.

Digger is complex, deep, and at many times overwhelming. It has so much to say in so many layers that it feels like something you need to watch and rewatch with intent to scratch the surface of its many themes. Digger often highlights deep rooted issues and perspectives succinctly in such successive intervals that to many it may feel overwhelming to grasp upon first watch through in its roughly 2 hour runtime. In that way, Digger says so much that many will likely lose the depth of its meaning by the shear number of its goals. Altogether Digger is not your average 50% on Rotten Tomatoes - its production is unique and polished, the characters are well played to the extent of their roles, and it pushes many boundaries of filmmaking; however it does so to what many audiences will feel is beyond the limit. 

Digger achieves something unique in that the film itself revolves around the production of a dramedy play about a real oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell who led the United States and the world to an interconnected catastrophe. The actors in this play live in the future from the events they portray and live with the daily consequences. The audience is two part. There is the audience watching the play itself, and then there is us. Digger makes it clear to connect each audience to the level they exist upon. The play audience is greeted to the sound of a Level 4 alarm at the conclusion of the play in which the audience puts on high tech masks and exits into a dystopian society lifted above climate crisis sea level rise and patrolled by a heavily militarized fascist state. When credits roll for Digger itself, music plays for a few minutes and gets abruptly interrupted by the same Level 4 alarm into your own auditorium. Digger wants you to see your current and anticipate your future self in retrospect to the play audience. 

Considering these levels, Digger is not ordinary. You can evaluate the play, - called Fossil Fools - their world, and the comparisons to our own and spill copious amounts of ink just trying to find the entirety of what was attempted to be portrayed let alone your own opinion of it. As many actors will contend, acting in a play has its own uniquity which film can struggle to replicate. Digger achieves this while also still maintaining its prose as a high level modern film, adding to its complexity and potential for interpretations. Speaking of which, in no exhaustive measure there are highlights below of some of the biggest takeaways for Digger.

In the play itself, nearly everything has a purpose.

The play is about Diggers life in a dramatic and comedic way. He has a cat which looks and is portrayed as almost a rotting corpse, however it likely acts as a metaphor for his and his families work unraveling as an oil rig fire in Greenland blows a chunk of an iceberg apart leading to an $18 Trillion catastrophe in Europe. As Digger receives news of the oil rig fire and the iceberg, characters emerge from doors leading to impossible rooms - harkening back to the Shining - and symbolizes how this crisis, to Digger, continues to emerge out of nowhere. At one point in the play, Digger and his team deliver the unfiltered truth to a European justice panel of how big oil intentionally ignored Methane as the final death blow to the climate crisis, the podium has Digger facing away from the head judge and audience itself. Then when Digger starts to blame society for needing oil and wanting to live their lives, the podium spins as Digger addresses - and attacks - everyone in the process. 

Perspective is truth. Or it isn't? 

Digger as a film really works to flesh this battle out as it defines much of the entire problem. Scientists in the play routinely discuss probabilities, realities, consequences, and more in many times eloquent and scathing forms which define a problem expertly in the language of science. The key problem here? Big industry, and government alike recognize that simple deductions can hijack a societies perspective of what is really happening and turn it against reality. At one point, Diggers top scientist - Dr. Ganesh - who we see throughout the film gets into a disagreement with Digger and the US president about the difference between perspective and reality. Dr. Ganesh states that you can have a perspective that a vase isn't broken, but then he slams one to the ground and states that it didn't matter what perspective they had. The vase is empirically broken. The crux of this back and forth is that to the human mind, perspective is an arbiter of what people see as truth. Scientists are trained to better account for this, but most people are not. So therefore if Digger and the US president aim to sway perception, they can often taint the truth.

Americanism is Self Centered, All Important, and Corporate

One of the most daring moments early on in Digger, was for the United States, and Rockwell industries to recognize that a large iceberg broke off from Greenland due to the recklessness of Rockwell, endangering multiple parts of Europe, and had multiple conversations about not notifying Europe that it was happening. They deployed a computer program to scrub the internet of discussions of the iceberg to avoid a mass panic among the citizens. Despite this, what about the European governments themselves? Why would the United States and Rockwell have to notify them of this impending catastrophe? While the European public would struggle to discuss or perceive the issue online, the point remains that in Americanism everything is centered around us. It's ridiculous to believe that only the United States and Rockwell could detect a colossal iceberg heading for the Norwegian coast. This ridicule is the point. Americanism is so supreme that all others pale in comparison. 

"No one care's about who left the toaster on when they're trying to escape the fire" 

One of the most ambitious lines of the movie. It creates the backdrop of how big oil and Digger Rockwell operates. 

The world is all connected. 

Every time they try to control a catastrophe