The new feature film Digger has faced a surprising barrage of criticism across the political spectrum. Reviewers on the political right have called it “a failed conceit” and “farcical and dull.” On the climate-progressive side, it’s been called “the most disappointing film of the year” and “a mess of shrieking and spittle.” And yet, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film may just be the most influential and well-timed movie about the climate crisis yet.

The movie centers on Digger Rockwell, an oil and gas tycoon presiding over a major environmental disaster caused by global warming but triggered by his company’s drilling—a giant piece of ice cleaves off the ice sheet and collides with the coast of Northern Europe, displacing hundreds of thousands. The disaster is hardly outlandish. Just six weeks before to the movie’s release, a gigantic portion of a glacier collapsed in Nepal, causing massive floods that killed over 1,400 people, left thousands missing, and forced tens of thousands out of their communities.

The film will probably be remembered cinematically for Tom Cruise’s unorthodox choice of character and for its iconic portrayals of wealth and power. But from a climate change perspective, the movie will leave its mark on culture and the public consciousness for three reasons.

First, it lays out in memorable terms what my colleagues and I have called “New Denialism.” This is the factually flawed idea that climate change is real, is happening, and is caused by human activity—but that decarbonization is unrealistic and expensive, and that the United States (and the world) can safely double down on fossil fuels and engineer our way out of any consequences. In the words of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, climate change is a “modest negative trade-off” that is the price of progress. Effectively, New Denialism is the official position of the U.S. government.

In one scene (that reviewers especially disliked), Digger Rockwell addresses the European Parliament, a kind of stand-in for the world’s climate-concerned. The speech is bombastic and shameless. Grist’s Jake Bittle called it “ugly, loud, and unpleasant.” But the speech itself is no exaggeration. It ticks through all the central tenets of New Denialism: Climate change is happening, clean energy is impractical and not really viable, and the world’s unwillingness to change its energy consumption patterns means that digging for more fossil fuels is the only option. Digger asks his audience: “Why don’t we just stop drilling altogether? You don’t want me to! Deep down inside you want me to keep pounding! Oil is what we have!”

The New Denialism may indeed be ugly, loud, and unpleasant, but it demands a response, and so far, the response has been inadequate. Americans are still more likely to tell pollsters that renewable energy should be prioritized over fossil fuels, but that share has dropped precipitously—more than twenty points since 2020. By putting this ideology out in its baldest, boldest form, Digger forces the moviegoing public to confront this uncomfortable fact and challenges those interested in climate action to craft a better narrative.

Digger’s second contribution is more unlikely: methane. Methane gas, which leaks out of oil wells and pipelines, is thirty times as powerful as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a century time frame. It’s eighty times more potent over shorter (twenty-year) horizons. If the world triggers the terrifying climate “tipping points” that scientists have been warning about for decades, it will likely be because of methane. 

From the opening scene, with the gas bubbling up from the ocean, methane plays a central role in Digger. The more Rockwell’s people drill, the more trapped methane is released. In turn, that means more warming, more melting, and more methane release. And on it goes, in an escalating spiral of climate destruction. In a pivotal scene, as Rockwell struggles to understand the crisis he has helped create, Ganesh, his environmental safety chief and the movie’s sole voice of reason, puts it bluntly: “CO2 is the trigger, but methane is the bomb.”

There is nothing fictional about the methane bomb. The international community has been slow to address the methane threat, but it’s beginning to move. Multilateral pledges to cut methane emissions materialized in 2021, supported by a new multilateral fund. In the United States, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act contained a key provision with real teeth: a methane fee that powerfully incentivized oil and gas companies to reduce methane leaks in their operations. But the fee was swiftly scrapped by the Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025.

The movie’s final contribution is not about stopping climate change. The so-called solutions the movie offers are late, desperate, and futile, which is why many in the climate movement were turned off by the film.

Digger asks a different, more difficult, but important question: What is the appropriate moral and emotional response in the face of the man-made disaster that is the climate crisis? And how will we collectively process everything we are losing—and may yet lose—as a result of climate change? Ecological grief, or solastalgia—the existential distress we feel from negative environmental change and the losses it brings—is very real, especially among younger generations. And it’s going to grow, the product of future warming that is locked in by emissions already in the atmosphere.

The movie proposes one answer: We will process the catastrophe by recording and remembering the policy and political failures and by celebrating any form of retroactive accountability from those responsible. The film suggests that cultural production will be key, in this case a play that allows future theatergoers a place to mourn and laugh, to undergo collective catharsis, and to attempt to understand the incomprehensible. As one of the film’s characters puts it, “It’s ridiculous, and it’s scary, and it’s funny, and it’s stupid. It makes no goddamn sense, but it’s what happened.” Catharsis will be what we have left, but it will keep us going.

Digger is the first mainstream movie to venture into this uncomfortable territory. It does not offer the satisfying roast of the powerful that moviegoers got from Don’t Look Up (2021). Nor does it deliver the drama of grassroots activists lashing out against the oil and gas industry, as seen in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022). But it may yet start a conversation about how we collectively deal with ecological grief today and in the coming years. And by forcing us to imagine how much more we have to lose, it may inspire the rest of us to continue the fight to stabilize our climate.