With the notable exception of the Danes, reviewers worldwide have been fiercely critical of the new satirical film. Who is right?
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film, Digger, has been critically panned across the globe, sparking an international cultural divide that has left industry watchers and audiences baffled. The Boston Globe handed the high-profile project a devastating zero-star rating, while The Guardian dismissed it as “shallow, laborious” and labeled it “the most disappointing film of the year.” Financially, the project has stumbled out of the gate just as dramatically. Having cost an eye-watering sum of more than $250m (€223m) to produce and market, it managed to scrape together a meager $8m (€7.1m) domestically during its opening week in cinemas. Early box office returns have led some industry analysts to predict it could go down in history as one of the greatest financial flops of all time.
This catastrophic reception must be prompting profound reflection for the Mexican auteur, whose previous cinematic ventures—most notably The Revenant and Birdman—were universally adored by critics, showered with prestigious international awards, and wildly successful at the box office. In stark contrast, Digger’s leading man, Tom Cruise, is no stranger to living with the cognitive dissonance of scathing critical reviews paired with billion-dollar commercial successes throughout his legendary career. Yet, Cruise certainly does not help his own case with mainstream critics, given his famously eccentric public persona, his turbulent private life, and the persistent cultural baggage of his association with Scientology. It raises a speculative question that many cinephiles are quietly asking: might Digger have been judged far less harshly by international reviewers if a more traditional critical darling, such as Gary Oldman, had taken on the lead role?
The mystery of the film’s reception deepened in an unexpected setting. While dining with friends in Copenhagen, the conversation turned to the global mauling that Digger had received in the foreign press. An art director whose judgment is typically trusted on cultural matters looked completely perplexed by the assertion.
“What do you mean? It’s a masterpiece! Politiken gave it six stars,” he insisted.
Around the dinner table, nods of agreement rippled through the group.
“The Danish critics loved it!” another guest chimed in, going so far as to compare the sweeping satirical epic to cinematic milestones like Citizen Kane and Dr. Strangelove.
Suddenly, it was my turn to experience a heavy dose of discombobulating cognitive dissonance. Had I somehow stumbled straight into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style sci-fi scenario? Were my otherwise sensible dining companions secretly radicalized Scientologists?
Having been out of Denmark for a few days, I had only been exposed to the uniformly grim reviews coming out of the United Kingdom and the United States. Yet, a quick check proved my friends were entirely right. And it was not merely the left-wing broadsheet Politiken that had rolled out the red carpet with full marks; the right-leaning broadsheet Jyllands-Posten had done the exact same thing. Across nearly the entire spectrum of Danish media platforms, Digger was awarded maximum scores, being hailed as the “film of the year,” featuring what critics called “Cruise’s best performance ever,” and various other hyperbolic praises. Global media outlets were telling me the film was a total turkey, while Danish reviewers were dead-set on calling it an unmitigated work of genius. Naturally, it left anyone paying attention asking the ultimate question: who on earth are we supposed to believe?
Putting this specific film aside for a moment, it is worth asking whether this kind of extreme international critical schism has ever occurred in the past. Film history suggests that cultural bubbles are far more common than we might think. It is well-documented that London theatre critics historically used to meet up after press previews to ensure they were roughly on the same page regarding whether a stage production was an unmitigated disaster or a brilliant triumph. Having attended film critic screenings myself as a journalist, I can personally attest that a considerable amount of informal discussion and consensus-building takes place among reviewers immediately after a movie preview ends as well. Naturally, that kind of localized alignment cannot possibly work on an international scale, which often leads to wildly polarized responses across borders.
It turns out that there are fascinating historical precedents for this phenomenon. According to internet archives and box-office lore, Kevin Costner’s notoriously troubled 1995 blockbuster flop, Waterworld, performed surprisingly well in Japan. Scandinavian audiences are likely among the very few demographic groups who still warmly recall Antonio Banderas’s ill-fated 1999 historical adventure, The 13th Warrior—largely, it appears, because it featured Vikings. German film critics famously penned glowing reviews for The Tourist, the widely maligned Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp thriller that was largely dismissed elsewhere. Meanwhile, French cineastes have historically worshipped American comedian Jerry Lewis as an avant-garde artistic genius, a perspective that has frequently left American audiences thoroughly bewildered. More recently, French critics also offered high praise for Ella McCay, James L. Brooks’s political comedy from the previous year that was quickly forgotten elsewhere and currently languishes with a dismal 23 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Determined to see the root cause of this transatlantic divide with my own eyes, I decided to go and see Digger for myself. Interestingly, the cinema screening was notably fuller than usual, providing yet another clear indication—beyond the enthusiastic responses from my Danish friends—that traditional film critics still retain a measurable degree of cultural influence over moviegoers. Upon watching it, I concluded that the film was not outright awful, but rather aggressively on the nose and deeply exhausting. It features highly strung, frantic performances and a narrative structure that meanders down a series of bizarre, unsatisfying dead-ends. Not since Bradley Cooper’s performance in Maestro has an actor targeted an Academy Award quite so strenuously, but I suspect Cruise has very little chance of taking the stage to deliver a polished Best Actor acceptance speech this season. One cannot help but feel a genuine sense of sympathy for Sandra Hüller, either. She is undeniably a brilliant, deeply nuanced actor, yet in this project, she appears relegated to little more than screaming and gurning for the camera.
Then again, that is just one person’s opinion in a world where the cinematic consensus remains entirely fractured.
