The Digger first reactions are out, and if you were hoping for a tidy consensus, buckle up — this is less “rotten tomatoes” and more “tomatoes thrown at each other in a dark alley.”
Tom Cruise’s latest gamble, an Alejandro G. Iñárritu-directed, prosthetics-heavy swing into art-house-adjacent territory, has just cleared its first wave of press screenings, and the Digger first reactions flooding social media read less like a review consensus and more like several different people watching several different movies.
So What Actually Is “Digger”?
Before we get to the chaos, some groundwork. Digger reunites Cruise with an Oscar-winning auteur best known for Birdman and The Revenant, and it does not look, sound, or apparently feel like anything Cruise has made in years.
Tom Cruise returns to serious drama with Digger, and the first reactions have landed, and per the film, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, features a stacked cast including Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, and Jesse Plemons. Sandra Hüller and Sophie Wilde round out an ensemble that reads like an Oscar-bait fantasy draft.
Cruise reportedly plays a transformed, prosthetics-caked oil baron, in the kind of transformed, prosthetics-heavy character turn he has never attempted at this scale, according to The Cinema Group.
Fittingly for a film this odd, there is also a twist early in the film that reportedly upends the entire premise — and that twist is apparently already as divisive as the movie itself. The film opens in theaters, including IMAX and VistaVision, on October 2, so critics only just got their first look, which is exactly why the internet is currently vibrating with Digger first reactions threads.
The “This Is a Masterpiece” Camp
Let’s start with the true believers, because their enthusiasm is genuinely delightful chaos. ScreenRant’s Liam Crowley reportedly called the film a masterpiece outright, admitting — refreshingly — that he’d disliked the trailers going in, per Yahoo Entertainment, which noted he called it “an extremely important film” and his “new top contender for Best Picture.”
Jake Hamilton of Jake’s Takes went even further, and per ComingSoon.net, he’s naming it his favorite film of 2026, praising the way he avoided spoilers so the film’s surprises could actually land.
Elsewhere, per the same roundup, he described it as “a bit Kubrick, a bit BLACK MIRROR but also feels original,” which is either the highest compliment a film can receive or a description of someone’s fever dream after eating cheese too close to bedtime. Either way, it’s a wildly complimentary entry in the Digger first reactions sweepstakes.
Film Threat’s Chris Gore kept it simple, calling it, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the biggest swing of Cruise’s career — which, considering this is a man who has hung off the side of an actual airplane for our entertainment, is saying something.
The “Absolutely Not” Camp
Then there’s the other half of the Digger first reactions coin, and they are not here for it. Next Best Picture’s Matt Neglia liked Cruise personally but not the movie surrounding him, per Mandatory, which reported he called the film “a hollow misfire.” His colleague Mike Ryan was blunter still, dismissing it as “generally unpleasant.”
Awards Radar’s Joey Magidson offered one of the more quotable pans of this whole cycle, summing the film up in two words — “a mess” — while The Cinema Group noted he also felt “not a whole lot works here” and that he simply didn’t enjoy the experience.
Polygon’s Jacob Kleinman landed a backhanded compliment for the ages, writing per the same piece that Cruise is great, but he’s the least interesting actor onscreen — in his own movie, no less.
Also Read: Digger Box Office Forecast: Why Tom Cruise’s Weirdest Swing Yet Might Whiff at the Multiplex
The “I Have No Idea What I Just Watched, But I Respect It” Camp
This is where the bulk of the Digger first reactions actually live, and it’s the most entertaining category by far. TheWrap rounded up critic Scott Menzel, who called the film, in his own assessment, “ambitious, messy and strange,” while predicting per TheWrap it would prove incredibly divisive and get people talking.
Variety’s Clayton Davis framed the film’s reception as a referendum on Cruise’s drawing power, writing per the same report that how audiences react may be the ultimate test of Tom Cruise’s star power.
The Film Maven’s Kristen Lopez put it as succinctly as anyone in this whole news cycle, per The Hollywood Reporter: “DIGGER is a very mixed bag.”
And IndieWire’s chief critic Anne Thompson delivered what might be the single most quoted line of this entire Digger first reactions cycle, calling it, according to IndieWire, “a brave and gorgeous art film” that she predicts will not score with mainstream audiences but will play best for the Academy.
Why Are the Reactions So Wildly Split?
Here’s the entertaining part: this isn’t critics being fickle, it’s the movie doing exactly what an Iñárritu joint tends to do — swing hard enough that half the room ducks. A few clear threads explain the chaos running through every single Digger first reactions thread this week:
1. It’s a tonal shapeshifter. One critic described it, per IndieWire, as feeling like STRANGELOVE, until it turns into something else entirely — a Dr. Strangelove pastiche that mutates mid-film into pure Iñárritu. Genre whiplash tends to either thrill audiences or lose them completely, and Digger apparently does both, sometimes to the same viewer.
2. Cruise, unrecognizable. Nearly every single review, positive or negative, agrees Cruise disappears into heavy prosthetics as the film’s oil-baron lead, a transformation The Hollywood Reporter notes he pared down from six hours to just one in the makeup chair once the process was refined. When your biggest movie star vanishes behind latex, audiences either lean in fascinated or feel cheated out of movie-star Cruise.
3. The satire is a gamble. This is being pitched as an eco-satire about the end of the world, and satire is famously the genre where “hilarious” and “unfunny” live two doors down from each other. One critic bluntly compared watching Iñárritu attempt comedy to watching Frank Gehry try to draw a straight line — not necessarily an insult, but not exactly reassuring either.
4. Awards season stakes are sky-high. With Cruise having been nominated four times without a competitive win, every one of these Digger first reactions is being read through an Oscar lens, which raises the temperature on every single opinion.
The Verdict on the Verdicts
If there’s one thing every single outlet covering the Digger first reactions agrees on, it’s this: Tom Cruise is doing something in this movie, and it’s the best “something” he’s attempted in years — even the film’s harshest critics keep circling back to praise his performance while torching everything around it.
Whether Digger ends up as Cruise’s most audacious swing or his most audacious swing-and-a-miss depends entirely on who’s writing the review — which, frankly, is the most Iñárritu outcome possible.
Digger opens in theaters, including IMAX and VistaVision, on October 2 — so the real reactions, from actual audiences with actual popcorn, are only days away.
