Digger deserves a defense, but declaring its detractors incapable of understanding it is a weak place to start. The more persuasive argument concerns its characters: a destructive businessman, an actor trying to understand him, and a director who thinks that search risks missing the audience’s needs. Their competing claims make room for a difficult distinction. Understanding someone’s behavior does not require forgiving it.
That is the angle through which Alejandro Iñárritu’s film becomes worth arguing about. Frida Garza’s favorable assessment establishes a useful counterpoint to its hostile reception, describing both the oil-industry satire and the theatrical structure beneath it. The following is an interpretation of those documented story elements, rather than a claim that every objection to the finished film is mistaken. [Garza’s Digger review](https://grist.org/culture/digger-has-a-lot-of-haters-heres-why-theyre-wrong/)
Spoiler warning: This analysis discusses the film’s central narrative reveal and later character relationships.
Digger Rockwell: Responsibility Before Relatability
Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell is an oil tycoon who disregards scientific warnings about Arctic drilling. An explosion at his Greenland operation precipitates an enormous ice disaster. John Goodman plays President Compson, whose support for the drilling connects private ambition with political permission.
My reading begins with the order of those events. Warning comes before catastrophe. That matters because it prevents the businessman’s panic from becoming an automatic claim on our sympathy. Fear after a disaster may be sincere without canceling responsibility for the decisions that preceded it.
There is a useful viewing test here: distinguish what a character feels from what those feelings entitle him to. A frightened person can remain culpable. A ridiculous person can retain power. A moment of vulnerability can deepen a portrait without functioning as a redemption scene.
This is also why asking whether Rockwell is likable gets us only so far. The more revealing question is what he considers negotiable. When other people’s safety becomes something a powerful person can weigh against his own purposes, the drama already contains a moral argument. It does not need a confession to make that argument visible.
Curtis Markson: Does a Villain Need an Inner Life?
The major reveal changes the problem. Cruise also plays Curtis Markson, an actor portraying Rockwell in a stage production. Curtis struggles with the character’s motivation, while the production’s director, Hannah, played by Sophie Wilde, challenges his approach.
For Curtis, an explanation is a practical artistic need. Actors require something to play beyond a verdict. Greed may describe a character from the outside, but it does not necessarily tell a performer how that character justifies the next decision to himself.
That search can be ethically valuable. If destructive people are presented as an entirely separate species, audiences receive an easy exemption: those people are monsters, and we are recognizably human. A comprehensible villain can be more disturbing because his excuses may sound familiar.
Yet Curtis’s position also deserves scrutiny. Demanding psychological complexity can become a way of returning attention to the powerful person whenever the consequences of his actions enter the conversation. The interesting question is whether explanation sharpens responsibility or displaces it.
Our discussion of the distinction between an actor and a role offers a related starting point. Here, the extra complication is that the performer’s own demands become part of the drama.
Hannah: The Audience Has a Claim, Too
Hannah’s argument gives the dispute its necessary second perspective. Her concern is the production’s value to people living with catastrophe and loss. From that position, the actor’s need to understand the perpetrator may look less urgent than the audience’s need to confront him.
A short line captures the challenge: “We’re laughing at you.” The dialogue, reproduced in Chris Lambert’s character analysis, turns laughter into an accusation that reaches beyond Rockwell toward Curtis. Later, Kenny’s “Now what?” poses a different challenge: what follows once everyone has defended a position? [Lambert’s analysis of Digger’s characters and dialogue](https://filmcolossus.com/digger-kenny-good-bad/)
I find the tension between those questions more productive than a simple endorsement of either speaker. Hannah is right to insist that the audience matters. Curtis is right that performance involves choices about human behavior. Neither principle settles how much attention the other deserves.
Consider the difference between laughing because a powerful person looks foolish and laughing because his authority has briefly lost its hold. The sound may be identical. The emotional experience is not. Comedy’s ethical meaning depends partly on who gets relief, who becomes visible, and who remains outside the frame.
Where the Defense Needs Limits
None of this automatically makes an abrasive movie successful. Intention cannot substitute for an engaging scene. A film may have a reason for frustrating viewers and still frustrate them beyond what its ideas can sustain.
The theatrical reveal therefore deserves a demanding test. Does it change the meaning of what came before, or merely explain why it seemed exaggerated? Does it make the characters’ disagreements more consequential, or encourage the audience to admire the construction?
Those are legitimate grounds for disagreement. Calling every dissatisfied viewer a hater erases the difference between rejecting a difficult idea and finding its presentation ineffective. A strong defense should identify what remains valuable even when a criticism lands.
For me, that value lies in the competing obligations built into the character conflict. This connects with the question of unequal sacrifice in our character-focused analysis of Bread and Roses: an argument changes when we ask who must live with its consequences.
The Deeper Question: What Does Understanding Require?
The richest interpretation of Digger is that understanding is an obligation without being an acquittal. Curtis’s desire for motivation need not absolve Rockwell. Hannah’s concern for wounded audiences need not make every artistic objection self-indulgent.
A viewer can hold both thoughts at once: this person had reasons, and those reasons were insufficient. That is a harder judgment than dismissing him as incomprehensible, because it requires following the reasoning all the way to the point where someone else pays for it.
This is the film’s strongest claim on a skeptical audience. Its character structure invites us to examine the distance between explanation, sympathy, and accountability. Whether every scene earns that invitation remains debatable. The invitation itself deserves more than a quick dismissal—and a better defense than telling people they failed to understand it.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 9, 2026 at 20:44:12 PDT (Los Angeles time)
