Alejandro Gonzalez Iñàrritu’s Digger is on track to become one of the biggest fiascos in Hollywood history. In addition to being star Tom Cruise’s biggest flop in nearly two decades, it’s also one of his most polarizing. The reviews, including here at The A.V. Club, have trended toward negative, and the film’s Cinemascore, the industry-trusted gauge of how audiences feel about a movie, is at an unpopular C+. That’s certainly not at Mother! levels—Arronofky’s film received the rare F—but in terms of audience reception, it’s not good.
Nevertheless, Digger is an intentionally provocative movie, one that admirably tried to bring general audiences into the theater, even if it cynically attacks and mocks the audience that bothered to show up. However, in the eyes of its auteur, everything’s going according to plan. Speaking to The New York Times, Iñárritu claims to appreciate the debate over whether the film is good or not, preferring that to “the lukewarm reception.” (He must’ve been over the moon about the reception to Bardo, which fared even worse in 2022.) The Oscar-winning director waged a much less forceful defense than his star, who over the weekend posted he was “so proud of what we created” on Instagram. “The movie is not perfect,” Iñárritu says of the film originally titled Blah Blah Blah. “But I like taking risks.”
In this case, Iñárritu understandably sees his movie differently than perhaps most of the critical community. In his defense, his view largely mirrors the movie’s own, which frequently waffles over whether Digger is supposed to be intentionally bad and unfunny. He sees it as a conversation starter. “My personal taste is films that try to tell me something in a different way,” he tells the Times. “There’s people that want more certainty in the storytelling, and that’s OK too. This is not like an ice cream. So, yeah, we expected that, to be honest.”
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