Warner Bros. has released the official trailer for Digger, giving the public its first substantial look at Tom Cruise as an eccentric billionaire oil baron rather than the sprinting, stunt-hauling Cruise of his recent franchise work.
The film is a satirical black comedy from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the four-time Oscar-winning director of Birdman. It is his first English-language feature since The Revenant, released in 2015.
Warner Bros. had already shown new footage from Digger at CinemaCon in April. The Hollywood Reporter described that presentation as one of the event’s standouts. Until this trailer, general audiences had seen far less: a title announcement and a May teaser that mostly looked back over Cruise’s career, with about 30 seconds from Digger attached at the end.
The official description of the film is blunt: “The most powerful man in the world races to prove he’s humanity’s savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything.” Based on the trailer, that disaster involves environmental collapse, a fast-melting iceberg and nuclear waste. Subtle, this does not appear to be.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oilman whose look is deliberately far from his usual movie-star packaging. The trailer shows him with thinning hair and a paunch, a physical transformation more in the lane of his supporting turns in Magnolia and Tropic Thunder than his action-hero roles.
The footage positions Rockwell as a man trying to sell himself as the fix for a catastrophe tied to his own power and industry. That tracks with Warner Bros.’ logline, though the trailer does not spell out the full mechanics of the crisis or how Rockwell caused it.
The tone being sold is broad political and ecological satire, with the kind of end-times absurdity that invites comparison to Dr. Strangelove. The trailer appears less interested in realism than in watching powerful people turn disaster management into self-mythology, which is a tidy way to make a black comedy out of an iceberg and nuclear waste.
Warner Bros. has not, in the material available here, laid out more plot details beyond the logline and the trailer’s imagery. For now, the hook is Iñárritu returning to English-language filmmaking with Cruise buried under character makeup and playing a man whose rescue pitch may be part of the problem.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
