A new trailer for Digger has arrived, and the first thing it does is make you look twice at Tom Cruise. He plays Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful man in the world, with a thick Southern accent, a pot belly and thinning white hair, scrambling to prove he is humanity's savior before the catastrophe he set off finishes the job.
The more interesting choice sits behind the lens. Alejandro G. Iñárritu shot the film in VistaVision, a widescreen format from the mid 1950s, using a camera design from 1954, and he brought back Emmanuel Lubezki, his cinematographer on The Revenant. VistaVision runs the film horizontally to get a much larger negative, which is why it keeps getting revived for work that wants enormous detail. Choosing it for a satire is strange and completely deliberate.
This is his first English language film since The Revenant, a long gap for a director who spent the middle of the last decade collecting Academy Awards. Bardo, the film in between, was in Spanish and openly autobiographical. Digger looks like a hard turn away from that: a comedy of political collapse, co-written by Iñárritu and Sabina Berman.
None of which is evidence the film works. A trailer is a sales document, and satire about a powerful man wrecking the world is exactly the kind of thing that plays beautifully across two minutes and curdles across two hours. There are a hundred and twenty nine minutes to fill here, and this is not a director with a history of filling them lightly.
Digger opens in theaters on Friday, October 2. If you want the format the way it was intended, it is worth the trip to the largest screen you can reach.