Digger: Tom Cruise breaks the world, then insists he can fix it (film: trailer).
The final trailer for Digger arrived in my inbox this afternoon, and I have now watched it four times, which is three more times than I watch most things and roughly four more times than I expected to watch a film whose title sounds like a children’s programme about an excavator. It is not a children’s programme about an excavator. It is Alejandro G. Iñárritu handing Tom Cruise the keys to the apocalypse and then filming, in a 1954 celluloid format, what happens when the man refuses to admit he has lost them.
The logline, such as it is, remains gloriously vague: the most powerful man in the world has unleashed a disaster, and he is now sprinting about trying to convince everybody that he is in fact humanity’s saviour, before the thing he started catches up with him. Warner Bros. have been selling it as a comedy of catastrophic proportions, which is a lovely bit of copywriting and also, I suspect, a warning. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell. We are not being told what Digger did, what Digger unleashed, or why the entire planet appears to be a countdown clock with a marketing department. This is either supreme confidence or an admission that the plot cannot survive one paragraph of summary. On Iñárritu’s form, I would bet on the former.
Whether this belongs on SFcrowsnest at all is a question I have decided to settle by simply declaring that it does. Man-made extinction event, ticking clock, the powerful failing upwards while the biosphere files a complaint, a protagonist whose self-belief is the actual antagonist. That is science fiction with the ray guns swapped out for press conferences, and frankly it is the sort of science fiction that dates the least. Dr Strangelove did not need a spaceship either.
The supporting cast is the bit that made me sit up. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Robert John Burke, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman and Sophie Wilde. That is not a cast list, that is a hostage situation for awards season. Hüller alone can convey seventeen distinct varieties of moral disappointment with one eyebrow, and pairing her with a character described by his own director as charming and impossible to look away from feels like a deliberate act of cruelty toward the audience. Burn Gorman turning up is my personal reassurance that at least one person on set will look appropriately worried at all times.
Behind the camera it is the usual Iñárritu supergroup reassembling for one more difficult album. Emmanuel Lubezki on cinematography, Stephen Mirrione and Conor O’Neill cutting, Jacqueline West on costume, Alessandro Bertolazzi on hair and makeup, Francine Maisler casting, Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson on production design. Then, quietly buried in the credits like a landmine, Kazu Hiro on prosthetic makeup. Hiro is the man who turned Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill and Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly. Hiring him is not a neutral act. Somebody in this film is going to look like somebody, and every trade journalist in Los Angeles has presumably already drafted three versions of that story.
The screenplay is by Iñárritu with Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone, the Birdman team, plus Sabina Berman, from a story by Berman and Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth. Butterworth’s involvement is the detail I keep returning to, because Butterworth writes the sort of dialogue where a man explains himself so beautifully that you only notice halfway through that he is confessing. Iñárritu produces alongside Mary Parent and Cruise himself, with Joshua Grode executive producing, for Legendary and Warner Bros. The budget has been reported at around a hundred and twenty-five million dollars, which for a satirical black comedy is either brave or an elaborate practical joke on a spreadsheet somewhere in Burbank.
Scoring duties go to Cosmo Sheldrake, and I would like a moment with this, because Sheldrake is a musician best known for building compositions out of field recordings: birdsong, underwater noise, fungi, the general racket of a planet going about its business. Handing that man a film about a planet being ruined by one confident idiot is the single most on-the-nose creative decision of 2026, and I mean that as high praise. He is also the son of Rupert Sheldrake, the morphic resonance chap, so there is a decent chance the soundtrack will be available on vinyl and simultaneously in the collective memory of all living things.
Technically, the boast is that Digger was shot entirely in VistaVision, the horizontal large-format process Paramount cooked up in 1954 to fend off CinemaScope and then abandoned when everyone realised it made projectionists cry. It has enjoyed an unexpected second life lately, and the reason is straightforward: run the film sideways, expose a much larger negative area, and you get a picture with genuine depth and grain that no digital sensor has yet convincingly faked. Shooting an entire feature that way in 2026 requires a director with clout, a studio with nerve, and a camera department with the patience of medieval stonemasons. It will look magnificent. It will also, I guarantee, produce at least one anecdote about a camera magazine being carried up a hillside by four people.
Digger opens in cinemas and IMAX across Ireland on 2 October, with North America the same day and some international territories getting in as early as 30 September. Iñárritu started developing this a decade ago, straight after The Revenant, which means he has spent ten years thinking about how the world ends and concluded that the correct genre for it is comedy. Given the last decade, I cannot fault his reasoning. Go big on the screen, go early on the ticket, and try not to think too hard about which real-life someone Kazu Hiro has been working from.
