digger review
Big time Digger spoilers here! You are NOT allowed to read this unless you've seen Digger!
I really liked Digger. As I reflect on it, I mostly just like it more and more so far. For the first couple segments of the movie, I was having fun watching Tom Cruise and John Goodman ham it up as cartoon caricatures, but I was also falling into an understanding of why this was negatively received: grating, overly broad satire was not exactly what I was hoping for from this thing. I was enjoying myself but not loving it, and not sold on it working for 2 hours straight. Then its first big reveal happens: a tree falls, and a giant man peaks out to see what went wrong. Then many people come out, revealed to be stagehands working on the in-universe production of the play whose rehearsal we've been watching up to this point.
The world outside the play feels more grounded and realistic, though we only catch glimpses of it at first. But understanding that Digger Rockwell's colorful, oversized persona is a work of fiction performs the magic trick of allowing the stupider, more grating moments to be "intentionally" stupid. Maybe it's a copout, but it worked for me, especially since the reality it's mocking is all so stupid anyway. As the movie progresses, we see Digger the oil tycoon and John Goodman the president doom the world by confidently, stupidly wielding their ungodly power to try and satiate their greed. We see more and more of the world this play is being rehearsed in and come to learn that the play is a satire of the "real" (in-world) events that led to the flooding of the Earth. Seeing this context provides added punch to the banal evil portrayed in the play.
In the movie's final moments, we see the play's audience in rapturous applause as they witness Digger throw himself into the ocean, sink to the bottom of the sea and drown. And I too felt emotion come over me. An odd sort of beauty of seeing a crowd cheer for a version of the most evil man alive becoming less and less alive. In this moment I felt a certain jealousy that their villain was dead and they could celebrate that. I felt the shared catharsis that art can bring. The perseverence of art in the apocalypse. Then the crowd empties the theater to a dreary grey-skied, flooded, radioactive city over which credits play. We return to our dying/dead world.
For another beautiful, less cynical look at art and healing in the post apocalypse, I recommend the Station Eleven miniseries (I'm sure the book is good too, I have not read it)