Tom Cruise's 'Digger' Opens to Brutally Split Reviews as Warner Bros. Launches 'Decide for Yourself' Ad

A new ad for the Tom Cruise climate satire quotes both "Masterpiece" and "Unpleasant" in the same frame, toggling between "Brilliant" and "Baffling" and "Magnificent" and "Insufferable," according to Variety. The campaign's tagline asks moviegoers to "decide for yourself." That range captures a critical response defined less by consensus than by mutual incomprehension: The London Evening Standard called the film "audacious, risky, terrific fun," while The Boston Globe rated it zero stars and labeled it "the worst movie of Tom Cruise's career," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In Digger, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging Texas oil tycoon whose drilling operations in Greenland dislodge an ice shelf the size of Manhattan, triggering a global catastrophe. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jesse Plemons co-star. IndieWire calls Digger "a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat," a VistaVision satire so high-concept its running time might be measured "in altitude than minutes."

The Hollywood Reporter compared Digger to Damien Chazelle's Babylon, David O. Russell's Amsterdam, and Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, calling it "a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay's Don't Look Up seem almost innocuous." The Guardian noted that the film "finds itself in a postmodern hole." Deadline called Digger a return to the adventurous cinema of the 1970s and praised a 10-minute monologue in which Cruise's character admits guilt but spreads blame collectively.

The BBC's critic wrote, "Personally, I loved it," while conceding that most viewers would wish it were shorter. Empire credited Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and Dennis Gassner's production design with achieving the intended Kubrickian grandeur. Yet some reviewers found the film's excesses purposeful.