DIGGER 2026

Digger is skippable. The writing is bad. Nearly everything else is good to excellent: the cinematography, the sets, the performances, the sheer density of invention. It is tedious, reflexive, frequently obvious. But it is also easy, at times, to be swept along by. It has high poetic value even when it has very little left to say.

The problem may be that Digger is composed on themes it can no longer develop. Climate catastrophe, AI, political spectacle, billionaire stupidity: the film is current, but current in a moment when these subjects have already been talked nearly to death. Digger says AI is supposed to solve the problems it is helping to fuel. This isn't untrue. It just arrives already digested. The fruit isn't false; it's spoiled.

So the movie keeps redirecting its thematic energy into texture. Dialogue becomes less important. The politicians behold a catastrophe somewhere offscreen. The pale horse is barely beheld at all. A daughter in trouble becomes a deepfake. Left, right, left. A butt joke can suddenly take center stage. The film seems increasingly distracted from the responsibility of making its themes cohere, as though Iñárritu has lost control of the project.

But the loss of control may be where Digger becomes interesting. Instead of producing an argument, it produces a texture: gummy, dying, expensive, ridiculous, beautiful. The dying cat becomes an accidental model for the movie itself. Does it hate you or love you? It is repulsive and endearing at once, something the film insists on lavishing affection upon despite its obvious deterioration.

By the end, Digger does conjure something. Digger's apotheosis is mostly signaled rather than explained, but perhaps explanation would ruin it. “Avian Elegy,” that zany little melody, bookends a mutant earnest positivity emerging from all the irony and cultural rot. Digger's affection turns out to be real. The movie has spent so long behaving as though sincerity itself must arrive damaged that damaged sincerity becomes its emotional language.

Maybe that's the achievement. Digger (original title: Blah Blah Blah) cannot discover much that is new about its themes, so eventually the themes stop governing the movie. Surface becomes texture; argument dissolves into affect. What remains is spoiled fruit—overripe, gummy, already rotten—but strangely sweet enough that the movie's affection for it becomes contagious.