On its dystopian surface, Digger seems little more than a box-office flop with a done-to-death message: the son, or, better yet, nephew, also rises. Gregory Clark’s 2014 history of social mobility—or lack thereof—traced the stubbornness of surname supremacy over eight long centuries. It’s a cavalcade of nepotism grimly reinforced in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s soggy and sprawling puzzle box of a disaster movie. Or so it seems…
Herewith—for those scared off by the establishment critics’ shrieks of dissatisfaction with the film, over something they could not quite, tellingly, identify or name—the plot, to make Iñárritu’s deliberately long story short. On with the spoilers: Latter-day dynastic heir Kenny Rockwell (Jesse Plemons) perpetuates his family’s grip on monied power by serving cathartic clapter theater about the downfall of his infamous uncle Digger (Tom Cruise) to the bedraggled survivors of said uncle’s catastrophic resource extraction. Driller! Digger! Get it?
Anyway, the big half-sunken city’s ticket-buying public pack sold-out theaters for a night’s escape of sorts, dutifully filing back out when the curtain falls into the Europoor wasteland that awaits: military police, drone patrols, flotsam, jetsam, hooliganism, graffiti, the works.
