It's an interesting movie with an interesting popular reaction. Digger is currently on pace to be one of the biggest financial bombs of all time, at least Top 5, maybe Top 3. But critics like it, and it seems like the Reddit/Twitter film crowd love it.
I didn't like it. 3/10. I have two big problems with Digger:
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Even if you like the ultimate thematic payoff, the journey there isn't worth it. About 2 hours of this 2.5 hour movie is annoying cartoon people screaming at each other as ridiculous straw men of the elites. It is very much in the mode of Don't Look Up. It's occasionally amusing, but mostly annoying, and for a movie with so much dialogue, I found it all very surface level stuff about how people are (supposedly) lazy, irresponsible, and letting our planet get destroyed by (leftist) environmentalist concerns. Maybe I just don't like satire in general, it always reminds of the meme where a strawman just shouts opinions in a funny/stupid voice.
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I find the ultimate thematic thrust somewhere between muddled and banal. It seems like the ultimate point of the movie is to say that making satirical art about evil elites doesn't stop elites from being evil. Which... yes, that's true, but who doesn't know that? It seems like the movie was directed at the extremely small group of self-important pretentious people who think that Don't Look Up and Dr. Strangelove can change the course of history.
I give the film credit for its weirdness, some really good visuals, and that they spent almost $200 million on an arthouse movie, but still. Didn't like it. It's very pretentious and not as smart as it thinks it is.
Wouldn't this thematic angle work much better if Fossil Fools actually was good? If the (in our real world) audience was watching Fossil Fools and laughing at all the jokes and enjoying the satire, then the twist would be a thematic sucker punch. But with Digger, we spend two hours watching something annoying and dumb and then the twist is that it's annoying and dumb on purpose.
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