There are certain things audiences have come to expect from a Tom Cruise movie. Huge action, impossible stunts and a leading man who usually looks completely in control are pretty high on the list.
Digger looks ready to throw a lot of that out the window.
The final trailer for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new movie has arrived, and Cruise appears to be having a very different kind of fun this time around. He plays Digger Rockwell, a wildly powerful man facing a fairly serious problem: something he set in motion could destroy everything, and now he is racing to convince the world that he can also be the person who saves it.
That setup alone sounds unusual. Then you see Cruise.
With white hair, a different physical appearance and an outsized personality, he barely resembles the movie star audiences have watched outrun danger for decades. It is one reason Digger has become such an interesting entry on this fall’s movie calendar, with recent awards-season previews already pointing to Cruise’s satirical turn as something worth watching.
Digger lets Tom Cruise play against expectations
That may be the biggest attraction here.
Nobody needs to wonder whether Cruise can carry a massive action movie. He has answered that question plenty of times. Digger gives him the opportunity to lean into something stranger.
The character at the center of the story has enormous power, a very high opinion of his ability to fix things and one catastrophic mess hanging over him. Rather than approaching the material like another traditional hero story, the trailer suggests Iñárritu is playing with ego, power and the absurdity of a man desperately trying to control a situation that has grown far beyond him.
And Cruise looks completely committed to it.
The transformation itself has already attracted attention. The earlier trailer revealed Cruise with combed-over white hair, prosthetic work and a dramatically different physical presence, making this one of his most noticeable onscreen transformations in years.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu gives Digger an unpredictable edge
Having Iñárritu behind the camera makes the whole thing even harder to neatly categorize.
This is the filmmaker behind Birdman and The Revenant, and Digger marks his return with an original story that seems comfortable moving between comedy, disaster and something much darker.
The basic situation is simple enough. Digger is an enormously influential man who believes he can be humanity’s answer to a disaster he helped create.
What the movie does with that idea is where things could get interesting.
The final trailer gives us more of the scale of the disaster while keeping the tone slightly unhinged. Cruise can be commanding in one moment and ridiculous in the next, which feels like exactly the point.
That is a very different assignment from saving the world as Ethan Hunt.
Watch Tom Cruise in the final Digger trailer
The biggest reason to be curious about Digger may simply be seeing Cruise take this kind of swing. After years of watching him redefine what an action star can physically do on screen, this movie is asking audiences to watch him disappear into a character instead.
The final trailer offers the best look yet at just how far he is going.
Check out the final trailer for Digger below.
Digger opens in theaters and IMAX on October 2.
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