Digger and What’s Making Us Happy

Digger is a loud, surprising, audacious, and sure-to-be-polarizing entry in this year’s Oscars race. The film stars Tom Cruise as a powerful oil baron who’s helped unleash an existential threat on the world — but that’s only the beginning. The looming devastation attracts the attention of the president (John Goodman) and a well-intentioned scientist (Riz Ahmed). The film takes some pretty big narrative swings along the way. But will Digger work for everyone? Want more Tom Cruise? Check out these episodes: In 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,' Tom Cruise is too controlled https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/1253043760/in-mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning-tom-cruise-is-too-controlled 'Top Gun: Maverick' puts Tom Cruise back in the cockpit, 36 years later https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101500031/top-gun-maverick-puts-tom-cruise-back-in-the-cockpit-36-years-later 'Mission: Impossible' is back, but will you accept it, or will it self-destruct? https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1185129902/mission-impossible-is-back-but-will-you-accept-it-or-will-it-self-destruct Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:14Speaker 01

  I had heard beforehand that this was a, almost a three-hour movie. And it isn't. It's a two-hour movie. But I think you spend the next 40 minutes arguing about it. Yes. It kind of takes up that time. We did, there in the theater. I mean, afterwards, we came out and we were just buzzing.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  The new movie, Digger, is a loud, surprising, audacious, and sure-to-be-polarizing entry in this year's Oscars race. The film stars Tom Cruise as a powerful oil baron who's helped unleash an existential threat on the world, but that's only the beginning. I'm Stephen Thompson. Joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is NPR film critic Bob Mondello. Hey, Bob.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Also with us is Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi. Hey, Roxana.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Hey, thank you for having me.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  So to give a general sense of what's going on here, the Digger in the title is Digger Rockwell. He's a swaggering, good-old-boy oil man, played by Tom Cruise in heavy prosthetics. Early in the film, we learn that Digger is responsible for a drilling expedition in Greenland that's gone terribly awry due to his negligence and is sending a massive ice shelf floating to the northern coast of Europe. That looming devastation attracts the attention of the president, played by John Goodman, as well as a well-intentioned scientist in Digger's employ, played by Riz Ahmed. But there's even more than that going on in Digger, which takes some pretty big narrative swings along the way. Now, it's tough to talk about Digger without spoiling some major twists and reveals.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  And because the movie is coming out today, we're going to keep this conversation as spoiler-free as humanly possible. But just to be clear, that's leaving out a whole lot of what Digger is all about. The film was directed and co-written by Alejandro G. Inarritu, whose past films include The Revenant and Birdman. Now, Bob Mondello, I'm going to start with you. What'd you think of Digger?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I had the best time. I was so intrigued by this movie. I haven't been asked to think a whole lot at a movie in a while, I don't think. And this one required me to think and to think hard about a lot of the things it was trying to do. I had a ball at this picture.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  OK, so thumbs up from Bob Mondello. How about you, Roxana?

• 2:33Speaker 03

  We, you know, sometimes it's nice when we see a movie together so we can talk about it in the lobby afterward. And I remember telling you, I might wake up tomorrow morning and love this movie. And I'm not at full love yet, but I am at a lot of admiration. And people will say, like, they admire a movie when they don't want to admit that they liked it. I liked it. But I also admire all of the things that it's doing, the ways that it's constructed. To Bob's point, the fact that it makes you hold, I would say, like, three to four ideas in your head at the same time. When was the last time a movie did that?

• 3:16Speaker 03

  And it wasn't doing, like, time travel or, like, genre stuff. Like, there's something really interesting about the way that this movie plays out. It keeps adding little details that you need to sort of, like, file away for later. But it is very propulsive. It's a great time. I really enjoy Tom Cruise, and I think that he is doing something here that he has not done, I would say, since collateral, honestly, in terms of acting. So I'm also pro. I'm not on love yet. Maybe check in with me tomorrow morning, but I'm almost there.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  One of the things I thought about, I had heard beforehand that this was a, almost a three-hour movie. And it isn't. It's a two-hour movie. But I think you spend the next 40 minutes arguing about it. Yes. It kind of takes up that time. We did, there in the theater. I mean, afterwards, we came out and we were just buzzing, right? We were just, you know, sort of bouncing off the walls. It was, I thought it was fascinating.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  I think it is definitely a movie that is, is not going to elicit a, yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  But I do think there is a significant percentage of the audience is going to be infuriated by this movie.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  I do think this is going to be one of the more, kind of, polarizing entries in the Oscars race. And there often are movies like that, right? Like, there is a didactic quality to the film that occasionally recalls Don't Look Up, which was a very polarizing film in an Oscars race from a few years ago. Inarritu has made polarizing films like Birdman. Some films are just attempting really, really big swings, and those are going to work more for some people than for others. I will say, for me, like, yes, it is a very propulsive film. It is a very loud and grabby film. There is, long stretches of this film are just, like, men screaming at each other.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  And as some of those scenes were playing out, I found myself kind of feeling hostile toward this film in the way that it felt sort of hostile toward me. But then, of course, and we can't reveal how or why, decisions are made in the film that recontextualize some of what we're seeing and make you understand why some of the weird choices that are being made in this film are being made. There are elements of the look of this film that are a little inscrutable early, that make a lot of sense late. And in that way, I did ultimately find myself enjoying it and found myself, as Roxana said,

• 5:50Speaker 02

  admiring it, which can sound like a very backhanded way to praise a film. But I do think there is going to be an army of haters.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Certainly.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Coming after this movie.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  The film that it reminded me of briefly in spots, because it's tackling something that is very much of the moment, right? We're very worried about global warming and all that kind of thing. This, this notion that a chunk of Greenland floats off, creates havoc, is, is sort of of this moment, in the same way that, say, Doctor Strangelove was of its moment.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Right? Well, I went back and looked at reviews of Doctor Strangelove, just to refresh my own memory about how, because now it's regarded as a classic. Almost everybody thinks it's freaking brilliant, right? And at the time, The New York Times just dismissed it, other people dismissed it. It was, it was incredibly controversial and, and sort of all over the place in its critical appraisal. And so I think that it's reasonable to expect that same kind of thing. Whenever there's a movie that sort of takes a big swing, this is a big swing in some of the same ways that that was. There are these major speeches in the middle of it that, that you just think, whoa, you know?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, and it's very broad in spots.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Right. I'm remembering George C. Scott doing this incredibly broad read of a general, whatever his name was. And it was, it was very funny. I can imagine this picture 25 years from now being seen in that way. I wouldn't be surprised if it were. I think it's very much of this moment, but speaking to a future.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  I also think, in general, and this is sort of building on Bob's point, is that I think at the time, we just reject satire generally. Like, I am thinking of my favorite satire recent years as Observe and Report, which is a very nasty movie starring Seth Rogen as a mall cop. And it really is like a treatise on police violence. And at the time, like, nobody got that or enjoyed that message. And I feel like in, you know, like, the 15 or so years since that movie came out, it's like, oh, no, that's born out. So I do think there is something here which feels very current, but at the same time,

• 8:06Speaker 03

  alludes to the fact that climate change is an issue that we have been arguing about socially for decades as well. So I think there is sort of, like, this broadness to it, Stephen, because I think it is sprawling and trying to tell this, like, decades-long context for this issue. But the way that the production design looks, the way that it's shot, the focus on these actors' faces, in a lot of ways, it made me think of, like, a bizarro Wes Anderson movie. And I'm good with that. I'm really, I'm really okay with like a nightmarish version of a Wes Anderson.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  So I just think for as much as sometimes my attention deviated a little bit when there are these rooms of yes, white men yelling at each other and just like amping each other up, then it would sort of move to a composition or a staging that was not what I anticipated or expected, and it pulled me back in.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  I'm glad you mentioned the production design because I do think there are some really, really clever choices there. Much of this film is set kind of inside this kind of fascinating building where there are screens behind them. And you can spend a lot of time in this film just kind of looking at the way shots are composed. It's beautifully shot. There's also, there's a scene where Digger is giving this kind of thunderous monologue, which, which I suspect you'll see versions of that monologue in auditions for years to come.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  But the costuming in that scene, I thought was so clever. The way that colors are playing off each other in that scene, I was struck by kind of the beauty and the cleverness of the look of that scene.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  I'm also struck by the things he's saying, which sound as if he had listened to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men and said, I want to do the you can't handle the truth speech.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  It's like, I mean, I, I thought that was what that was. It's just gorgeous. He's not the only one who has speeches either. I mean, Reza Ahmed has a amazing takedown. I, there, there's some, there's some really, really interesting writing going on in this. It's, it's a complicated movie under every circumstance. And then it's like all kinds of interesting stuff in addition to this thing about global warming.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I also think, and this is just my own preference, and so I might say this and turn people off as I am saying it. But I think that a lot of the issue for me personally with our recent satire also is that so often it sort of ends with this like tidy, actually everything is going to be okay messaging. And I like that the movie rejects that. But I also just think it sort of adds to this sense, like, as you both have been saying, that through these speeches, the movie is really trying to interrogate something, which you can't do in two hours, but it is leaving you with all of these questions that like have been discussed in eco sci-fi for a long time and have been sort of nibbled at through

• 11:14Speaker 03

  other mediums. But here we're really getting like, we're going to throw you into this argument and you have to figure out what you're persuaded by.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Can we talk about the cat?

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, we should.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  That cat is amazing. Digger has a cat and it's 30 years old. And it is, it is the saddest creature I have ever seen in my life. Oh my goodness. And he is so devoted to that cat in ways that he doesn't seem devoted to the world or any number of other things. And it's like, whoa. I kept looking at it and thinking, oh my God, it is not quite real.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's a big uncanny valley thing going on with the cat that I could not tear my eyes away from.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  There are all these little touches like that, which are like production design, set design, effects, all these little things that just made me think, again, a lot of thought and care and deliberation went into making this world both recognizable to us and not. Cause there are some things like midway through the movie that start getting introduced that made me think, did I, wait, did I miss something like earlier? But the movie just, it depends on you to be paying attention. And that's what I want from a movie. Trust me.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I kept realizing that I had, I had actually seen something that set this up earlier.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Right. But had not really registered. It, it just was, it was there. And I, as I'm watching the movie, I'm thinking, oh, I get it. That was this. And, and anyway, it's, I think it's fun to see a movie that requires you to do something besides, I don't know, except that superheroes can fly and that time can be traveled through. I just, I found this so refreshingly engaging intellectually, it almost could have done anything it wanted in the last 45 minutes. I, and it kind of does actually.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And to my mind, I think it needed to.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  The, the decisions that it made for me were very clarifying in a way that made the earlier part of the film make more sense and made me less frustrated with it. I did want to talk about, you know, and obviously this is the time of year where, where studios start really rolling out the big Oscar movies. You know, we never want, you know, every discussion of every Oscar movie to be like, what are its chances? How many noms is it going to get? I do think that part of assessing this film is like, is this going to be heavily Oscar nominated? Cause I came away from it thinking, I, I think it's gonna be.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  I can't imagine that Cruz wouldn't be nominated. I think his performance is astonishing.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  It's a big most acting kind of performance. He's doing a lot of acting.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  He's doing a lot of acting, maybe too much, but just enough acting. But I do think that sort of everything that we've been speaking to, I think in this current era of the Oscars, there is a lot, I think, of sort of implicit pressure to be relevant in terms of like, what is going on in the world. So even if the movie is divisive, which I think it will be, and even if it is a flop, which it might be, I think that there is enough in this film that is reflecting like our general social like malaise and concern that I think enough people will be like, hey, check out what this movie was doing to approach that in a different way.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree completely. And I, I think that this is the kind of movie, first of all, Inuri 2 is the kind of director that the Oscars love.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  They have, they have loved, I think considerably worse Inuri 2 movies than this.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Birdman.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Oh, Birdman.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  And I think this film kind of fits in the general vibe of kind of your weirder picks, you know, that get kind of folded into the best picture field. Films like Poor Things, films like, well, Blonde didn't, Blonde didn't get nominated for Best Picture and is a terrible movie, but Anad阿m has got nominated.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  We disagree there.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, Roxanne, I hated that movie so much.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  But yeah, but there have been like very divisive things that have been nominated in the past.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  As much as I liked Cruz, I'd like to say that Reza Ahmed is doing some very interesting work there. He's not doing anything like something I've seen from him before.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And it's one of the few subtle performances in this film.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yes, I agree.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know about that. I mean, Jesse Plemons is subtle. On the other hand,

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Seriously, go see this movie and so that we can participate in the discussion afterward. And at some point, let's revisit the film when we can talk about it. I, I feel like the way we could talk about Citizen Kane now, and I could say Rosebud's a sled, right? There is so much I want to say.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Geez, okay, Bob. Spoiler warning?

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Bob wants to integrate so much language from this movie into our common vernacular.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, look, I think you might love it. You might hate it. You will definitely have opinions. All right. Up next, what is making us happy this week?

• 16:21Speaker 00

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• 17:52Speaker 02

  Now it's time for our favorite segment of this week and every week. What's making us happy this week? Bob Mondello, what's making you happy this week, buddy?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Well, there's a book about an actress I have long admired, Jane Fonda, and it's called Fonda on Film: The Political Movies of Jane Fonda. And this seemed like the right moment for me to be reading that because we're heading into an election and it's unnerving. And many, many years ago, I spoke to Fonda when I was interviewing her for a then-new film called Agnes of God. And I asked her what she wanted to be remembered for, which is the kind of question that you ask when you're very young and you don't know any better and you're confronting a really impressive person. And she said something very simple. She said, "making a difference."

• 18:43Speaker 01

  And I thought, this book is all about how she did that. It is about the movies in the 1970s, from Klute to Coming Home, to all the ones you remember, basically, to Nine to Five, the films that, through which she tried to make a difference. And Nelson Presley, who wrote it, has long been a writer for The Washington Post. And I think it's a fascinating book. And I've just found it kind of really intriguing reading right now because a lot of the things that she was dealing with are the things that we're dealing with today. So anyway, it's called Fonda on Film: The Political Movies of Jane Fonda by Nelson Presley.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Nice. Thank you, Bob Mondello. Roxana Hadadi, what's making you happy this week?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  What is making me happy is, as you know, as a TV critic, I watch a lot of current television, new television, the endless deluge of television. And so every so often, I need a break from that and I go back and I re-watch an older show. So what I have been doing is I have been re-watching Alias, which has been so, so fun. And I have such a distinct memory of like, being on the middle school bus and like, talking about cliffhangers with my friends. And so it is really taking me back to an earlier time in television with like 20-plus episode seasons and just a real deftness in terms of how these episodes were written and constructed.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  And it's just a blast of a TV show, right? Like Jennifer Garner is amazing. Michael Vartan is sometimes the hottest man who has ever lived. It's just a very, very fun time. Victor Garber is always like glaring and you want to know what he's glaring about. So that's been really a good time. And I figure, you know, with streaming costs going up seemingly every month, I want to actually be able to use some of these subscriptions to watch things that I haven't watched in a long time. So you can stream Alias on Disney+.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Excellent. Bob Mondello and I were also watching Alias in junior high school.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Yes, of course. Thank you for that.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Roxana. So last week, Taylor Swift released four new songs as part of a deluxe reissue campaign for her album, The Life of a Showgirl. And among the album's four new songs is what I would consider the worst song of Taylor Swift's career. It is called "Cleveland."

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yes, I knew.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  You knew what I was gonna talk-- you knew as soon as I said the worst song of her career that I was talking about the Cleveland.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  And it's just like the shallowest, most spiteful, least relatable possible way to be in love. And understandably, fans and critics alike have been dunking on this song like crazy. Now, I am no Taylor Swift hater. I think she is phenomenal when she steps back and sings about things that are not what it's like to be Taylor Swift. She has had in the past a gift for writing truly relatable songs, but this song is so rough. And I think I'm in agreement with most of her fans that I would like to hear her go in literally any other direction. So what is making me happy?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  As a non-hater who hates this song, I've been giggling for days about this Instagram reel from a user by the name of Dead Eye Breakman.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  I mean, it's better than the song, so.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  It is better than the song. Football man, football man. And it's like, that's actually a catchy song. At one point, Madison, Wisconsin catches a stray. I love this clip. It delighted me so much. It basically was like the payoff for enduring this song I hate so much. I hope Taylor Swift takes the reaction to this song to heart and not just as one more reason to feel like a victim because she is capable of such great music and this ain't it. So what is making me happy? Dead Eye Breakman on Instagram taken a not-so-gentle little swipe at a song that really should not exist. That is what is making me happy this week. That brings us to the end of our show.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Roxana Hadadi, Bob Mondello, thanks so much for being here.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  This was really fun. Thank you.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Kayden Mills, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next week.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Google Workspace with Gemini. Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins, just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at g o o dot g l e slash Workspace with Gemini. This message comes from Angie. Angie has been helping homeowners find skilled pros to get their home projects done well for over 30 years.

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