I saw the new Tom Cruise movie everyone's gabbing about, Digger.
It's a film I'm torn on, and it seems so is everybody else, audience and critics alike.
The trailer offered something very promising, like a modern Dr. Strangelove. And the parts of the movie that are like the trailer are quite enjoyable. The caricatures of the government, big business, the military, etc. are clearly inspired by a lot of modern politics and current events without directly aping any one person in particular. Trump's intimidating people into being yes-men; Biden's age and cancer (and others like Mitch McConnel); George W Bush getting the shoe thrown at him. It's not skewering any one individual or group in particular, but you can clearly tell where it takes inspiration from in real life and morphs that into this strange fever dream concoction that is entertaining to watch. Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell kills it.
It's also quite intelligent in certain ways, and I think the best part of the film is Tom Cruise as Digger's speech inside the EU? UN? (or some unnamed international body like them) where he effectively fesses up to his own complicity and neglect, his own responsibility for tragedy, only to turn the tables and declare, "So what? I dig because you need me to." I rather enjoyed that monologue, highlighting the hypocrisy of liberals who cry about climate change though modern life is powered by the very causes they fight against. This led to me feeling like the politics in a movie otherwise very environmentalist/about climate change and demonizing billionaires and the like still comes across as balanced and not overly biased.
Unfortunately, the movie shoots itself in the foot with a "twist" that is not shocking, as much as it is entirely jarring to the audience. If that weren't bad enough, this sort of "meta" approach it embraces, without entirely revealing what it is, simply undercuts whatever the rest of the movie was doing. It kills the pacing and tension, kills any reason why the audience should care about the movie's world when the movie world itself doesn't take its own narrative seriously (which sounds weird to say about such an intentional farce, but trust me when I say that.) Worst of all, instead of allowing the narrative and characters to speak for themselves and let the audience form their own judgements about them, it devolves into the cardinal sin of storytelling: telling us not showing; really more like lecturing us in the audience directly, how we are supposed to feel about the people in the film.
It actually proves quite counter-productive, only to make the villains of the story feel counter-intuitively more sympathetic. And they really should be the opposite of that.
If you want to write a good villain, you have to make me love to hate him. That's easy if he does something bad to something good I care about. If you take away my reason to care about what he did, he doesn't feel bad and fails to be a convincing villain. Worse still, if he is meant from the onset to be something to be reviled, to merely be an object of schadenfreude, I can't help but find sympathy for the devil. You land up alienating the audience from your own themes by being so clumsily blunt in the delivery.
Ultimately, it's such a difficult film to rate, though not to review, because it's definitely not a bad movie, nor is it a successful one either. I mean, financially it flopped, but this kind of avant-garde, arthouse stuff was never going to be financially a huge hit regardless. Its artistic failure hurts because it was not entirely meritless but had so much potential for a brilliant film in there, that shines in certain moments. It just astounds me though that "that twist" somehow made it past screenings and the ensemble of writers. None of them thought, "Hang on here, are we sure this is really a good idea? Maybe we can rewrite that?" Or perhaps I have it backwards. Perhaps it started out better and got watered down into a mess because of too many cooks in the kitchen. Who knows.
