Sian Cain and Robert Daniels recognize the same gamble in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger and reach opposite verdicts. Their disagreement makes a better reading path than a tally of favorable and hostile reviews. Both ask what happens when a movie deliberately stages the failures of political art.

Major spoilers follow, including the film’s central reveal and ending.

The failure is the subject

In Cain’s defense at The Guardian, Tom Cruise’s cartoonish oilman belongs to a play inside the film. Cruise also plays Curtis Markson, the actor struggling to perform him. The play, Fossil Fools, turns a climate catastrophe into loud villains and readily available blame.

Cain argues that its badness exposes an uncomfortable appetite. An audience can recognize catastrophe while still wanting an evening of familiar enemies, distraction, and release. Art can supply catharsis even when it cannot repair the world outside the theater.

The New York Times opinion essay develops a related defense through Amitav Ghosh’s account of our imaginative failure before climate change. The crisis overwhelms ordinary storytelling. On this reading, the contrast between the play’s shrieking caricatures and its quieter backstage relationships gives that failure a human shape.

The defenses differ in emphasis:

  • Cain asks whether audiences want uncomfortable truth or art that confirms what they already believe.
  • The Times essay stresses the emotional need for imperfect stories about a disaster too large to comprehend.
  • Both treat the gap between the play and the surrounding film as central to judging the work.

Intention still has to become cinema

Daniels’s review at RogerEbert.com understands the critique of blunt, self-congratulatory satire. His objection concerns its execution: the film spends so long inside its exhausting play that the backstage humanity cannot provide enough contrast.

He finds possibilities in Cruise’s performance and the production’s artificial sets. But he argues that the film’s shouting overwhelms those possibilities. Identifying a deliberate failure only starts the discussion of whether watching it is worthwhile.

Where the disagreement lives

These readings share more than their verdicts suggest. They all recognize a film concerned with how audiences consume political anger. They disagree about what the surrounding movie achieves with that recognition.

The question is whether the awkwardness creates a richer experience beyond the caricatures. Cain and the Times essay find grief, recognition, and communal release. Daniels finds those elements too thin to sustain the device.

That leaves a demanding standard for political art: a convincing account of why a work fails can itself be the work’s achievement. The experience on screen still has to earn that claim.

The Times essay was read in an archived copy from October 14, 2026, at 17:07 UTC. These are summaries of the critics’ arguments, not an independent verdict on the film.