This year’s Anora. Makes a heavy-handed Trump-sized point. Then makes it again. And again. And again. Until we’re reeling from a mega-budgeted bout of virtue signalling. Vanity project thy name is Digger. A couple of cinematic body swerves halfway in and, more potently, at the end can’t save this. And neither will streaming which occasionally digs a calamity out of its financial hole. Small-screen audiences are going to switch off in droves just as cinemagoers avoided it like the plague (I was the only person in my early evening screening on Monday).
We’re in standard disaster movie territory without any of the special effects, tidal waves, tsunamis etc which would normally account for the budget. Instead, it’s gone the other way, and more or less stuck us in endless rooms with the kind of politicians and money men scientists try to avoid like the plague.
It plays more like a bedroom farce without the sex, doors constantly opening and closing, people tripping over props (in this case a shovel) until you realize in what the director clearly thinks is a coup de theatre that it actually is a play, which partly explains the ultra-hammy performances, as if only the only idiots in power are shouty-shouty bombastic ones. So this is a play, that in itself given the staging and the huge cast, must have cost millions to put on, that concerns what happened years ago when billionaire oil magnate Digger (Tom Cruise) dug so deep into the Arctic ice shelf that he loosened an iceberg big enough to drift down into the North Sea and swamp most of Europe with, as we discover at the very end, global cataclysm.
In the “reality” part he’s obsessed with his cat, his oil, his billions and not taking the rap for exploitative exploration. In the play, Rockwell (Tom Cruise) playing Digger is obsessed with his daughter who has gone missing and with his understandable actor’s insecurity, constantly at war with the director. The ending, which is the best part, and not because this long trudge of a heavy-handed never-ending saga, is over has the audience don gas marks and emerge from the theater into a swamped city.
Tom Cruise has been here before, when he wanted to prove he was an “actor” and not just an action hero. Remember Lions for Lambs (2007), his first independent production, which targeted the U.S. Government’s involvement in Middle East wars and despite Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep sank like a stone because, guess what, audience don’t like to be lectured.
Guess what, audiences don’t like to be lectured to any more now. The interesting aspect is that audiences sniffed the wind well before this movie opened. Even suggestions in the media that Cruise was odds-on for an Oscar couldn’t tempt them in over the opening weekend. Had Warner Bros not already been taken over by Paramount Skydance, this is the kind of box office opening that could have sunk it, much as Michael Cimino’s misjudged western Heaven’s Gate (1980) did to United Artists.
So, yes, I can see this is making a point about eco threat and a plea not to allow the greed of nations and individuals to create catastrophe, but it’s not as if this is anything new. When Dr Strangelove (1964) warned about the dangers of nuclear warheads it had a lot more laffs. This might have passed muster had it been populated with great jokes and laugh-out-loud lines but the jokes you can coming a mile off and the stagey playing kills off any chance the lines have of creating a laugh.
I’m not even sure why Tom Cruise had to put on a fat suit to play Digger, as if all rich megalomaniacs are fat. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, paper thin the pair of them. Perhaps Cruise wanted to disguise the fact that he is, in fact, an old man. He’s 64 for goodness sake. The hairpiece and the kooky clothing would have done it.
So, sorry, this didn’t do it for me. I already knew this stuff and didn’t need someone spending $160 million to tell me.
