Digger (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2026)

[thirtyframesasecond]

Was Bardo any good? Looking back at Inarritu's career, I'm not sure I truly like any of these films (Birdman, especially - but even the earlier films like 21 Grams and Babel but at least they had Arriaga's scripts).

[Matt]

Was Bardo any good?

See the dedicated thread

[thirtyframesasecond]

Was Bardo any good?

See the dedicated thread

Thanks. Hit and miss then. Having now read the reveal of Digger, maybe these two films and Birdman share the sense of one man's existential crisis in common. Have to say it's a brave big swing of a film but it is going to lose a hell of a lot of money and Inarritu probably won't get a large scale personal film again and Cruise may just rethink doing anything more experimental again.

[Mr Sausage]

Yep, the movie's no good. Both critics and supporters seem to agree the movie's a wild, ambitious, swing-for-the-fences kind of creative risk, and disagree only on how well it lands. And I can't agree with either side: all the wild ambitious creative stuff felt pro forma to me. The thing's a fake, an attempt to mimic a huge risk-taking auteurist mess rather than the genuine thing. Which is why the movie felt so lifeless, why the hooting and grotesquerie was leaden: there's no conviction here, except to embody someone else's idea of a of a bold individualist movie. The whole thing feels like it's surrounded by quotation marks, and not just because much of the plot is literally surrounded by quotation marks. The bifurcated structure in and of itself felt like "big creative gamble" was branded across it rather than seeming like an actual creative gamble. It felt conventional, actually, just lifted from the conventions of the experimentalist mess. All of its themes and satire, from capitalism and climate change to family and the nature of art are just so rote, so trendy for a movie like this. So much here is impersonal and sententious. There's no real passion or anger radiating through, just posturing and calculation. Even the parts that are successfully meaningful carry no personal weight. A cobbled together mimicry of Art (with a built in defense mechanism to forestall that accusation!)

That's the only real annoying thing, that built-in defense mechanism the film grants itself to evade criticism. Ugly and unfunny? Laboured and vague? Poorly stitched out of received ideas? Well it's supposed to be! Nevermind of course that you have to spend 70% of your time watching something ugly and unfunny, etc. And that these criticisms apply to all the material that isn't covered by the defense mechanism. Beyond that, the movie sat dead on the screen for me and I felt nothing except slight boredom. To be passionately against the movie, I'd need to feel like it was trying to really do something, and it's not. Its only ambition is to seem like it is. The movie allows itself only one authentic emotion, a muted despair, and then only briefly and limply before fizzling. We've all given up and are going through the motions, the movie says...and so I guess have the creative team behind this message, to judge by the final product.

Spoiler

One of the satirical barbs here isn't bad: even after these ghoulish powerful men have destroyed the world and ruined everyone's lives, their families not only continue to be rich and privileged, but can fund the very art that lampoons them (degrading the worth of that art), knowing it won't harm them, and then get hugs and affection at the end for throwing around a bit of money even tho' the whole situation with the daughter only existed in the first place because of the Rockwell family's greed and corruption. The audience shouts and cries, gets their bread and circus or their two-minutes hate or whatever, and then proceeds back out into the nightmarish totalitarian world they inhabit, while the Rockwell family carries on just fine. A bleak and toxic point. Also a dead obvious one. It'd be very easy to overpraise this kind of thudding satirical point. But it's at least a point.

[Michael Kerpan]

Mr S -- You make this movie sound sort of like how I felt about (my once upon a time loved) BONG Joon-ho's Parasite.

[Mr Sausage]

Hah! I liked Parasite! But I also stopped thinking about it the moment I left the theatre and have kinda forgotten it exists. But I’ll say this: if it is a fake, it’s one Bong wished people to think was successful, while Digger felt like it was supposed to come across as a grand artistic failure from the start. As if that’s what Inarritu felt like a serious, authentic artist would do, make a bloated movie of ideas that fails spectacularly but shows the artist’s uncompromising creative originality. Even the movie’s poisonous view of art in the modern world felt like posturing meant paradoxically to bolster Inarritu’s status as an artist.