Unpacking Digger’s wild twist: What really happens?
Most people thought that Tom Cruise‘s latest movie Digger was secretly a musical. That wild fan theory was not true, but it does have a lot of secrets up its sleeve, including one very big twist.
*Spoilers after the plot synopsis*
Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron who owns a massive oil drilling platform in Greenland. He must face the music when his business causes a huge ecological disaster.
So what’s the big twist?
Well, Digger is a play within a movie.
Yes, you read that right! Cruise is actually playing an actor called Curtis Markson, who is starring as Digger Rockwell in the 25th anniversary production of the play Fossil Fools.
The performances are big and theatrical and the set looks oddly artificial, and it all makes sense in the first 20 minutes when the play twist is revealed.
We are then introduced to the play’s director Hannah (Talk to Me’s Sophie Wilde) and discover that we are watching a tech rehearsal ahead of the first preview that night.
The film then cuts between these rehearsal scenes and what’s going on with Curtis backstage. He’s having a crisis of confidence with his performance, he clashes with Hannah about creative ideas (which should have been ironed out by now), and he learns that his daughter got on a plane from Jamaica but missed her connecting flight. Where is she? He keeps taking phone calls from his wife about his daughter’s whereabouts, and this throws him off his performance. These FaceTimes flash up on his dressing room mirror, suggesting that we’re in the future.
Throughout these backstage scenes, we gradually learn the play is based on a true story: Digger Rockwell was a real person who ignored warnings about a crack in the ice shelf in Greenland until it was too late. A large glacier broke off and headed over to Europe. They tried to blow it up, but the bombs simply broke it up into pieces still big enough to cause tsunamis, flooding, and ruin the world forever.
It is later revealed that the whole play is being funded by Rockwell’s real-life nephew Kenny (Jesse Plemons) and he doesn’t care whether audiences see it as a satire, comedy, drama or tragedy. He spared no expense with this production because the sets are big, elaborate and detailed.
The show ends with Rockwell jumping off the platform of his oil rig into the sea and dying as the crowd cheers. Before the cast gather for their bows, Curtis learns that his daughter is safe, and they return to the stage for their curtain call.
Before the doors to the auditorium are unlocked, the audience put air masks on. They then exit the building into their grey, dystopian world, filled with flooded streets, signs of unrest, and armed robots.
What did I think of the twist?
The play-within-a-movie idea isn’t inherently bad. It’s unexpected and interesting, and certainly explains the over-the-top, theatrical performance, the set design (which is amazing) and the freaky animatronic cat. It also means Alejandro González Iñárritu doesn’t have to show the full Digger story, just a bunch of selected scenes highlighting key highs and lows.
The purpose of the behind-the-scenes section becomes clear at the end, when we discover the Digger story is real and what the world outside looks like because of his greed and willingness to put profit over human lives. But it really takes a while to get there, I felt sorry for Hannah having to deal with Curtis’s insecurities, and the missing-daughter plotline didn’t add anything or really go anywhere.
Overall, I respect a big, ambitious swing and applaud Cruise for taking on such a risky character. It has good things to say about climate change, billionaires and the manipulation of the truth but the messages get swallowed up by the film’s ambition and how loud, unpleasant and weird it is.
For more thoughts about the film as a whole, here’s my original review.
Digger is in cinemas now