What 'Digger's' Three Big Twists Actually Mean for Tom Cruise's Boldest Role

Alejandro Iñárritu has never been interested in straightforward storytelling, and Digger — his most formally audacious film to date — makes that abundantly clear within its first half hour. For Tom Cruise, it also represents something genuinely rare: an original, IP-free vehicle that asks audiences to interrogate the very act of watching him perform, according to Polygon's detailed breakdown of the film's structure.

The First Reveal: When the Stage Intrudes

For roughly thirty minutes, Digger presents itself as a sweeping, quasi-realist drama about Rockwell Digger, an aging oil baron whose Arctic drilling operation catastrophically dislodges a massive ice formation into the Atlantic — setting it on a collision course with Northern Europe. Cruise commands the screen with the kind of heavyweight authority the role demands, and Iñárritu shoots it with the grandeur of a full-scale prestige picture. Then a giant hand reaches into the frame from beyond the horizon, and the illusion collapses.

Everything we've watched, it turns out, is the final rehearsal of an elaborate theatrical production. Cruise is now Curtis, a working actor preparing to star in the play-within-the-film. This is where Digger runs into its most significant structural problem. Revealing that Curtis is simply an actor playing Digger Rockwell — rather than the man himself — has the unintended effect of deflating Cruise's performance retroactively. The swagger and moral weight that made the opening thirty minutes so compelling suddenly feel secondhand. The secondary storyline introduced here, in which Curtis's daughter goes missing during a diverted flight amid a brewing storm, gestures toward the film's climate-change themes without ever quite integrating into them meaningfully.

J.J. Abrams has spoken about what Cruise brings to the film's more demanding scenes, and it's worth holding that in mind when considering how much of Cruise's craft survives this first-act pivot.

Jesse Plemons and the Revelation That Saves Everything

Throughout the film, Curtis is trailed by Kenny, an enigmatic and financially powerful figure played by Jesse Plemons. Kenny hovers around the production with the energy of a man who knows something no one else does — which, eventually, proves to be precisely the case.

The second major reveal arrives during a late-film rehearsal in which Curtis objects to a scene depicting the U.S. President and Vice President flying together on Air Force One to oversee the bombing of a second rogue iceberg. His objection is a small but seismic detail: these events, he insists, actually happened within the world of the film. The play, titled Fossil Fools, is not pure satire — it is a darkly comic reenactment of a genuine apocalyptic event that reshaped the planet.

Before that revelation can settle, Plemons delivers what may be the film's most essential monologue. Kenny is, in fact, Kenny Rockwell — the real-life nephew of Digger Rockwell, who as a child was a minor character in the original, stripped-down London staging of Fossil Fools. That intimate, three-actor production became a cult classic for its ability to wring laughter from events that had caused immeasurable suffering. Kenny, haunted and moved by the memory of an entire theater audience breaking into applause and laughter despite having lived through genuine catastrophe, has spent enormous resources to give the world that experience again — on a grander stage, with the finest collaborators he could find.

What Iñárritu Is Actually Arguing

The architecture of Digger — a film about a play about a true story, filtered through one man's desire to restore communal laughter in a broken world — is a meditation on what art is for when reality has already exceeded imagination's worst projections. Iñárritu has explored the tension between performance and authenticity before, most memorably in Birdman, but Digger pushes that inquiry further into genuinely uncomfortable territory.

For Cruise, whose recent career has centered on spectacle and franchise continuity — a trajectory he seems eager to occasionally disrupt, as his surprise private IMAX screening for AMC staff suggested — Digger is a gamble on pure character work. The film's structural instability may be its point: meaning, like memory, gets rebuilt from fragments rather than delivered whole.

Related on Ni4o: J.J. Abrams Says Tom Cruise Will 'Blow Our Minds' in 'Digger'