Tom Cruise Plays an Oil Tycoon in Inarritu’s Climate Satire ‘Digger’

Tom Cruise has spent four decades as the man who saves the day. In Digger, the new film from the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, he plays the man who causes the disaster.

The Warner Bros. release casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an aging oil magnate whose reckless drilling in Greenland releases methane and sets off a huge explosion, according to a review published by Euronews Culture. A giant slab of Arctic ice breaks away and drifts toward Europe, and the president of the United States, played by John Goodman, decides that Rockwell must be the one to stop it. The cast also includes Riz Ahmed as the tycoon’s environmental scientist, Sandra Huller as his half-sister and Jesse Plemons. Inarritu wrote the script with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone and Sabina Berman.

The film is pitched as an eco-satire about a billionaire’s appetite for power and his talent for bending the public story to suit himself.

The studio is clearly hoping for awards attention. NBC News reported that Cruise has thrown himself into an unusually playful publicity tour, appearing on the cover of GQ, playing a human claw machine on The Tonight Show and explaining the history of the VistaVision film format on a popular podcast. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who has worked with Cruise told NBC that, for the first time in a long time, the star is not playing Tom Cruise in a movie.

Whether that gamble pays off is another matter. Euronews critic David Mouriquand called the film one of the year’s boldest and one of its biggest misfires, a broad farce about American geopolitics that loses its way. In his reading, the script never fully commits to its social criticism, the jokes are too thin and Cruise’s outsized performance distracts more than it convinces. He reserved his praise for the work of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner.

Admirers of the film’s ambition would answer that a major studio putting one of the world’s biggest stars into a deliberately uncomfortable role, in a satire about climate and power, is worth the risk whatever its flaws.

Digger arrives in a crowded autumn and at an uncertain time for its studio, whose parent company is in the process of merging with Paramount. Its box office over the coming weekends will show whether audiences are willing to follow Cruise somewhere new.