Essay by Eric Worrall
“… It is also the near-perfect climate change film for our era. …”
Tom Cruise’s Digger is a commercial flop – but also the perfect climate film for our time
Oliver Milman
Tue 20 Oct 2026 23.00 AEDTThe movie follows Digger Rockwell, whose drilling triggers a vast iceberg that’s five times the size of Washington DC
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Digger Rockwell, the eponymous protagonist played by Tom Cruise, is a bluntly caricatured Texas oilman blase about the environmental ruin of his drilling, even as it triggers a disastrous splitting of the Arctic ice sheet. This causes a vast iceberg, five times the size of Washington DC, to barrel towards Europe and threaten a devastating tsunami.
Much like this impending disaster and the real-world retreat of glaciers and coral reefs, though, the mere act of watching Digger has become a forlorn race against time. The box office failure has been resounding, and Digger’s time on the big screen has been brief.
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“Let’s cut the bullshit, you love oil,” as Digger tells enraged European lawmakers, all dressed in muted beige and grey, in a lengthy rant. “You want to bask in your unsustainable lives.”
…But Digger was the last Warner Bros’s theatrical release before it was purchased by Paramount Skydance and the Ellisons. Its commercial failure, along with the ideological leanings of the movie studio overlords, may deter further attempts to give us unvarnished tales of the climate crisis. That would be a huge, iceberg-sized mistake.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/oct/20/tom-cruise-digger-climate-film
The Guardian sidesteps one important point – “The Day After Tomorrow” was a commercial success because it was entertaining. I don’t care that the climate science in “The Day After Tomorrow” is nonsense, just as I don’t care that the physics of Star Trek is nonsense. If the film is entertaining, I’ll watch it.
“Don’t Look Up” and “Digger”, not so much on the entertainment front.
And to be fair to Star Trek, we’re more likely to witness the development of a warp drive than an anthropogenic CO2 driven climate crisis or gulf stream collapse. At least the Warp Drive concept, while highly speculative, is based on real physics.
