Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Alejandro González Iñárritu is, it’s fair to say, a director with a very odd back catalogue, notes Alasdair Stuart.

Starting with Love’s a Bitch in 2000 he’s come up through complex thrillers like Babel and 21 Grams  to colossal success with both 2014’s beautiful, odd Birdman and 2015’s super grim survival story, The Revenant.

Next for him is Digger, a science fiction comedy starring Tom Cruise that’s been kept notably under wraps for a while. And now its first trailer also kind of keeps it under wraps.

Yes, that is two and a half straight minutes of clips from Cruise’s previous movies including some really, early ones like 1981’s Taps. It’s a brave choice in a number of ways (Cruise is prolific, talented and incredibly troubling the moment you scratch the surface) and it means what we actually see of Digger is six shots.

• Digger’s shovel clanging to the ground in an abandoned building.
• Digger, wearing cowboy boots and a hat, walking down a marble corridor towards what looks like a classically designed old Senate in the style of ancient Rome but definitely contemporary. He’s holding a sheaf of papers and doffs his hat as he enters, the crowd applauding.
• Digger psyching himself up in an office where a guard is on the door. It’s littered with papers and looks very Kubrick-esque.
• A B2 stealth bomber flying over the ocean. Which might be freezing.
• The senate descending into mass panic and violence. Digger silhouetted against a curtain, a bottle in one corner and flames behind the curtain.
• Digger, wearing a shirt and pants, in what might be a care home, dancing with his shovel and dropping into a split. Sandra Hüller and Mercedes Hernández seem to be in this scene too.

The movie apparently has Cruise play Digger Rockwell, the world’s most powerful man, vowing to save the world from a disaster he’s unleashed. That disaster is apparently a deadly glacier called Judt which might go some way towards explaining that shot of a B2 over the ocean.

The cast also includes Sandra Hüller who did brilliant work in Project Hail Mary, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbard, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman, Pip Torrens and Mercedes Hernández, several of whom I’m pretty sure you can glimpse in the trailer.

I remember when this was announced and assuming it was a relatively straight played story and I’m, so happy to be proved wrong. This looks WEIRD in the best of ways and it’s ironic that the biggest visual cue here seems to be Doctor Strangelove, given what an infamously miserable experience Cruise had on Eyes Wide Shut.

Basically, I have almost no idea what this is and I’m very excited to find out. It opens on October 2nd.