Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger gives Tom Cruise an unusual role: an enormously powerful man confronting a catastrophe he helped create—and convinced that he may be the man who can save humanity from it.
Critics can’t seem to agree about the result. Is Digger an audacious satire, an expensive misfire, or something stranger and more interesting?
In this Listen with Gilbert, we look beyond the reviews to the questions underneath the film. What happens when good intentions are joined to enormous power? Is progress the same thing as wisdom? Can the people who helped create a problem be trusted to remake the world? And why are we so attracted to the idea that somewhere there is a sufficiently brilliant person with a sufficiently large plan who can finally put everything right?
G. K. Chesterton had a few things to say about reformers, progress, pride, humility, and the peculiar creature called man.
Drawing on Orthodoxy, What’s Wrong with the World, The Man Who Was Thursday, and The Everlasting Man, we put Chesterton into conversation with one of the year’s strangest and most divisive films.
Perhaps the most interesting question raised by Digger isn’t whether one man can save the world.
It’s whether the world’s would-be saviors have understood man in the first place.
