Should you see a Looney Tunes-style satire that stars Tom Cruise in prosthetics representing a loud caricature of an American oilman, which is currently on course to become one of the biggest box office failures of all time?
Absolutely yes, and it’s a film that redefined my expectations of what a film about climate change should be. ExcavatorAlejandro González Iñárritu’s critically panned and exorbitantly expensive new film questions the purpose of art and even the fundamental purpose of telling the truth in the face of a capitalist machine that is leading the world toward climate disaster. This deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to ask themselves what kind of characters we are most comfortable turning into climatic villains.
(Spoilers ahead: If you’re planning to see the movie, I really encourage you to do so before reading any further.)
The film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who wears only cowboy boots and lives in a mansion covered in wood and polar bear skin rugs. Early in the film, one of Digger’s oil drilling rigs accidentally causes a huge iceberg to break off, leading to a massive methane leak. Faced with impending catastrophe, he must alert the president (John Goodman, in a performance reminiscent of his best work with the Coen brothers) as the iceberg heads toward Europe.
Trailers present the film as an overly broad and painful satire of American oil companies and how a Trumpian-inspired religious right administration would respond to a full-blown climate disaster. Iñárritu, however, lets us in on the secret early on: the farce we’re watching is actually a play from the film, performed in a room with a leaky ceiling that’s constantly losing power. Tom Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather an actor playing Digger Rockwell.
We finally learn that the play, Fossil foolsdepicts events that actually happened decades ago. From there, you know that every joke, every villainous depiction of Digger and the President as truly bad guys, is aimed at two audiences: moviegoers in 2026 and theatergoers living in a dystopian future.
Based on the trailers, I initially thought the film was going to be similar to Adam McKay’s blockbuster. Don’t look fora climate satire that attracted record viewers to Netflix when it aired in 2021. Don’t look for Scientists are racing to inform the public of an impending asteroid collision and avert catastrophe against economic and political interests that have other plans. McKay, at the time, said the film’s goal was to make “people less tolerant of their leaders’ inaction.” If the media – journalists, filmmakers, etc. — could properly inform the public about the risks of climate change, the film (and its accompanying calls to action) posited, we would begin to see progress in reducing emissions.
Excavatorin the same way, deals with themes related to climate disinformation. Digger admits he ignored his own company’s warnings about the ongoing crisis on his drilling rigs. President Goodman and his cabinet decide to deploy a “firewall” that censors any mention of the climate crisis (including the phrase “Al Gore”) to control the narrative of what is happening.
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