If you scroll down through the "Carbon Majors" database—the roster of 178 corporate producers collectively responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s historical fossil fuel emissions—you will eventually encounter Continental Resources. Ranked roughly 150th, far behind titan state-owned enterprises like Saudi Aramco and investor-owned giants like ExxonMobil, the firm has nonetheless pumped out nearly 600 million tons of carbon dioxide since 2005 alone. That cumulative total is roughly equivalent to the combined carbon footprint of some two million average Americans over the exact same timeframe.
The founder behind this enterprise is Harold Hamm, a figure who cuts a striking profile as an archetypal American oil executive. Growing up dirt-poor in Oklahoma before working his way into the staggering fortunes of the fracking boom, Hamm still retains a thick Southern drawl. Today, he channels his immense wealth into the machinery of American governance, raising millions of dollars for conservative political candidates and funding aggressive campaigns against green energy initiatives.
If you squint at the screen, the protagonist of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new feature film, Digger, could easily pass for Hamm, or at least for the heavily stylized archetype of the American oil baron that has firmly embedded itself in the national consciousness. The film centers on a fictional oil executive named Digger Rockwell, a Texas-accented plutocrat who has expanded his late father’s wildcat drilling outfit into a sprawling global energy empire, complete with high-stakes offshore rigs operating in the remote waters of Greenland and Alaska. Portrayed by Tom Cruise with a distinct physical transformation, Digger embodies the ultimate Southern businessman-ideologue. He is partial to monogrammed private jet upholstery and thunderous, unhinged rants delivered about his own anatomy. Outside of generating astronomical profits, his sole apparent emotional attachment is to the welfare of his aging white cat, Maggie, whom he desperately attempts to keep alive against veterinary advice even as the animal visibly declines in his arms.
Digger sets out to examine two fundamental and contentious questions. First, how much direct moral and legal responsibility does an individual corporate architect bear for the widespread deaths, economic devastation, and human displacement wrought by global climate change? Second, what is the most responsible and effective way for an artist to interrogate that very question? For viewers who believe they already know the answers to both queries, this may very well be the movie for them, though that is no guarantee of an enjoyable cinematic experience. In attempting to construct a grand theatrical fable about the unchecked hubris of petroleum titans in the vein of Hamm, Iñárritu has ultimately delivered a film that articulates little beyond what an informed viewer already understands. The director appears acutely aware that political parables critiquing corporate greed often suffer from limited artistic nuance, yet he proves unable to escape the rigid narrative confines of the parable itself. The resulting picture is an unrelenting storm of shouting and vitriol that threatens to leave even the most climate-conscious moviegoers reaching for a remedy for their headaches.
Following an opening sequence designed to let audiences marvel at Cruise’s physical metamorphosis into an out-of-shape, older oil executive, the plot arrives with the subtlety and force of a tornado siren. A frightened technician aboard Digger’s primary drilling platform off the coast of Greenland calls urgently to report that a massive methane leak has opened up an expansive fissure, severely threatening the structural integrity of the region’s colossal ice sheet. Before Digger can even conclude a dismissive monologue declaring his refusal to shut down a billion-dollar platform over a minor crack, a delegation of corporate officers bursts into his presence to announce that the rig has suffered a catastrophic blowout and the Greenland ice sheet has officially collapsed.
The immediate consequence is a gargantuan, city-sized iceberg hurtling directly toward Europe, carrying the catastrophic potential to flood coastal nations and claim hundreds of thousands of lives. In response, Digger confers directly with the President of the United States, played by John Goodman, to map out a damage control strategy. The pair quickly decide on the most expedient path forward: continuing to drill.
This opening act achieves a level of heavy-handedness that largely eluded even Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, the prominent 2021 satire that similarly targeted those responsible for global inaction on warming by drawing an explicit parallel between climate change and an apocalyptic comet hurtling toward Earth. Digger’s proposed remedy to the unfolding planetary catastrophe involves deploying a proprietary digital censorship tool known as the "firewall," designed to systematically scrub all online mentions of the words "methane," "iceberg," and "climate change" from the internet. Meanwhile, the president and his conservative advisors offer predictable policy suggestions ranging from bombing the massive block of ice with military ordnance to simply praying to God for divine intervention. Whereas McKay favored a slick, CNN-toned corporate realism, Iñárritu opts for an eccentric aesthetic mashup blending the visual stylings of Wes Anderson and regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. Digger’s corporate boardroom is lavishly decorated with Art Deco murals glorifying historical oil discoveries, while hanging directly above the conference table is a glaring, literal sculpture of an ouroboros—a snake consuming its own tail.
The dialogue is similarly packed with insider winks and climate-policy jargon designed to appeal directly to the niche demographic of viewers who spend a significant portion of their daily lives tracking environmental politics. The script features pointed references to the disproportionate global warming potential of methane emissions and a fictionalized "COP30 fiasco" in which the United States allegedly alienates its international allies by abruptly withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. The vehicle for these didactic exchanges is a recurring debate between Digger and his resident corporate scientist, Ganesh, played by Riz Ahmed. These conversations inevitably devolve into rapid-fire volleys of familiar culture-war tropes. In one scene, Ganesh rejects Digger’s offer of a high-end sashimi platter on the grounds that bluefin tuna populations have plummeted by 97 percent, criticizing the administration for refusing to list them as endangered—only to sample the fish anyway and admit that he loves it.
Whether or not this aggressive satire offers an accurate reflection of the contemporary global economy, it rarely translates into an engaging theatrical experience. Well over half the running time consists of characters screaming at the top of their lungs about market caps, emission metrics, or regulatory frameworks. This reaches an exhausting crescendo in a central sequence where Digger berates the European Parliament, denouncing the continent’s politicians as rank hypocrites who happily consume his products while simultaneously condemning his corporate operations. Danish and German lawmakers howl back from the legislative benches, accusing the oil executive of mass murder for allowing the rogue iceberg to bear down on their homes, while Digger screams back for several grueling minutes about the absolute societal necessity of his crude oil. "You want me to keep producing!" he bellows across the chamber. "You demand, and I supply!" For anyone who has worked professionally within the climate policy sphere, participated in environmental activism, or engaged in online debates regarding energy transitions, the sequence will undoubtedly feel uncomfortably authentic, though hardly entertaining.
Had the screening not been an assigned professional obligation, many audience members might well have walked out after the European Parliament confrontation—not necessarily due to the political positions being argued, but because the scene is loud, abrasive, and visually exhausting. Regardless of whether a viewer sympathizes more with the defiant oilman or the panicked European delegates, enduring prolonged shouting matches proves draining. In a twist fitting of a Tom Cruise production, perhaps the most tranquil moment in the entire picture arrives when the U.S. Air Force scrambles a squadron of fighter jets to carpet-bomb the oncoming iceberg, offering audiences a rare stretch of silence.
The narrative eventually introduces a structural twist intended to signal that Iñárritu is attempting something more layered than McKay achieved in Don’t Look Up. Without giving away the specifics, the film reveals itself not merely as a straightforward parable about the dangers of climate change, but as a parable about the very act of constructing a climate parable. The underlying narrative gambit appears designed to interrogate the utility—and the limitations—of subjecting an audience to such heavy-handed environmental metaphors.
McKay’s obvious hope with Don’t Look Up was that cinematic fables might actively goad populations into political action. Yet subsequent political reality—exemplified by climate-skeptic leaders securing tens of millions of votes and a broader cultural trend toward deliberate environmental avoidance or "climate hushing"—suggests otherwise. Sitting through a fictionalized Hollywood drama about a tyrannical oil executive is unlikely to prompt a consumer to purchase an electric vehicle any more effectively than reading through a statistical ledger of the world’s top corporate emitters.
This raises a fundamental question regarding the purpose of such art. Iñárritu appears intent on making a case for the intrinsic value of chronicling our current historical trajectory, even when that chronicle inevitably relies on caricature and broad strokes. A small cadre of individuals really did amass staggering fortunes by marketing a commodity that underwrote modern global prosperity while simultaneously destabilizing the earth’s life-support systems, and those individuals remain far more incentivized to maintain production than to halt it. Is there inherent merit in preserving that stark reality for future generations, even if the artistic delivery is clumsy? During a pivotal moment in the film, one character neatly encapsulates this sentiment: "It’s ridiculous, and it’s scary, and it’s funny, and it’s stupid. It makes no goddamn sense, but it’s what happened."
Even so, narrative cinema requires emotional resonance, and Digger ultimately struggles to find a beating heart beneath its ideological posturing. Despite lingering close-ups of Cruise gazing longingly at his decomposing pet cat or watching an oil-rig sunset, the film fails to match the emotional depth of standard blockbuster fare. It carries about as much human warmth as a polarized social media debate over energy permitting reform, and its concluding assertion that storytelling itself can offer solace amid planetary crisis reads as a textbook case of an artist lecturing where dramatization is required.
If Iñárritu’s primary objective was to demonstrate through metaphor how corporate greed has accelerated the climate crisis, he has arguably succeeded, perhaps too well. If his secondary goal was to illustrate that this exact style of cinematic metaphor is inherently simplistic and of dubious political utility, he has accomplished that as well. Yet for viewers seeking an engaging evening at the cinema exploring the complex sins of modern industry, the experience leaves much to be desired.