Digger: Why Movies Can No Longer Properly Conceive of the Apocalypse

This article contains spoilers for Digger.

For a movie about the end of the world as we know it, Digger sure has a hard time imagining what that would actually look like. 

As the conclusion of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film reveals, New York City streets are overrun with floods of water, while survivors cling to life rafts and military enforcers, robots, and drones patrol the streets. Meanwhile, we are told a “level four” condition has descended (mirroring the same alarm system we’ve seen in the play, which has become a reality for the citizens of today). The theater-goers leave the play in gas masks, resigned to the fact that the air is presumably now unbreathable. 

According to the timeline of the film, it’s been 25 years since the apocalyptic events have played out and the world has barely moved on. The post-apocalypse is locked in a stereotypically apocalyptic stasis with all the usual signs of decay and disuse. We all know things are a bit shit. What’s the point in saying the future is like now, but without waste management?

Could it be that we can’t imagine the apocalypse beyond what we are already basically living in?

Back track for context, or for people who can’t actually be bothered to watch Digger. 

When the film begins it appears that Tom Cruise is playing corrupt oil magnate Digger Rockwell, whose ruthlessness and money grabbing ways have dislodged an ice shelf in Greenland which scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) predicts is on its way to wipe out massive parts of Europe, and later parts of America. The most powerful men in America opt to do nothing about it and the consequences are catastrophic. 

Except that about half an hour into the film we learn that what we are watching is a play, produced by the real Digger’s now grown-up nephew (Jesse Plemons), a multi-millionaire himself. Later still, we learn that this play, called Fossil Fools, is actually based on the true story of the real Digger who (according to the play) really did cause a massive eco disaster through his own greed. What’s more this play is having a revival 25 years after it was originally shown – the “now” of the film is actually in a dystopian future, while the “now” of the audience – us, not the audience of the play – is around about the time when Digger was going to further destroy the planet. 

This is what could happen if we don’t take care, the film warns, but also, if it does we will re-frame it as art and take it no more seriously after it’s occurred, solving nothing and leaving the same sort of rich idiots in power, guffawing and cheering at a show about the end of days, while actively enjoying the death by suicide of Digger. Meanwhile ordinary people suffer.

Love it or hate it, it’s a deliberately bleak ending. But it’s also vaguely underwhelming for a movie packed with so much cinematic flair and invention. Given that Digger’s deeds happened at least 25 years earlier, this apocalypse is simple and unconvincing. What we see are floods running through the streets, cars turned over and general dereliction. Something you might find perhaps a year after a disaster, but 25-plus years later? What, no one could clear up a few cars, get rid of the trash and make the streets flood-safe and workable? 

Clean up of Ground Zero following the September 11 attacks in New York City took around one-to-two years and the site was largely restored within a decade. The city of New Orleans will never look the same post-Katrina but it rebounded and is still a thriving community today. Why wouldn’t the future of Digger recover similarly? Particularly given that in Digger’s world new tech has been developed in that time (the passing of the phone number via finger tip, is surely just the “tip” of the iceberg, and certainly there’s infrastructure to restore the theater and put on a very technically advanced show). We are not saying that this isn’t all part of the film’s master plan – perhaps they are saying that, no, in this dystopia the wealthy care only about theater and tech and don’t care enough to fund even the most rudimentary levels of urban reconstruction. Maybe, maybe, but we’re not convinced.

It actually looks like a more worrying indication that we just don’t know how to imagine what a scary, realistic cinematic apocalypse looks like, in a way we once did. Think about Threads (1984), for example, or Grave of The Fireflies (1988), or even the more gentle but no less devastating When The Wind Blows (1986). These were narratives that leaned into the effects of the apocalypse, and that is not what Digger is. But for a film about storytelling, the lack of a compelling and ideally terrifying vision of our new version of hell would have been a final impactful hoorah.

Is it any wonder though, at a time when extreme weather and environmental disasters are commonplace, international schools are preparing for El Niño, and when poverty and starvation are so pervasive we don’t see this as apocalyptic at all. It happens. We rebuild. (Unless you’re watching the new Channel 4 reality show Apocalypse which plays it as a bunch of argumentative idiots scraping over tins of spam and weeing in buckets.)

In Don’t Look Up (2021), the world just dissolves, in 2023’s Leave The World Behind (which does a much better job of imagining what might happen) we see a pre-apocalypse but not what the post-apocalypse looks like, The only other options seem to be scorched earth type post apocalypses in Mad Max etc. And you could argue that that’s the point, in Digger, what we already have is a hell of our own making. But setting this 25 years in the future which looks just like now with a tiny bit of new tech is… lacking in imagination. As David Crow writes in our explainer “Fossil Fools is loud, obnoxious, and grating, but it also lets audiences jeer at the past while resting assured they’re more enlightened now.”. Is Digger really saying that 25 years after a(nother) global disaster the world is going to be give-or-take just about as shit as it currently is? Or is the main big difference that in 25 years we can’t be bothered to clean up?

In 1667 poet John Milton brought us his epic tome Paradise Lost, which states its aim is to “justify the ways of God to men.” A regular complaint, though, is that hell, Satan and his congress of fallen angels is WAY more interesting than Milton’s depiction of Eden (which essentially involves two naked people in a nice garden doing a bit of work and having a rest – which tbh, right now sounds pretty great.) Hell has lakes of fire, adamantine chains, chimera, demons of all sorts and a massive great palace called Pandemonium made of gold. When Satan heads off on his mission to mess up mankind, he meets Sin and Death, Chaos and Time, all gloriously personified in terrifying form. It’s pretty great! 

Hell is something we can’t truly imagine – or rather our imaginations aren’t hindered by any pre-conceived perceptions of what it is. Therefore Milton can write one of the most vibrant unfettered visions of the worst that could possibly come into his mind. It seems like with Digger, all we can imagine is a slightly worse version of what we already have. We’re so tired of our own apocalypse that it’s essentially just the current status quote but without infrastructure. Accurate perhaps – time will tell – but hardly thrilling or even much of a cautionary tale.

Perhaps this is a churlish point to make about a film which is essentially a thought experiment. But I for one would like to see a really bold vision of the hell we might be cruising towards, something frightening that might kick us up the bum, or if not, provide the kind of cinematic vision that film is built for, before we crawl out of the theater to our own slow-burn destruction.