Neil Young hails "Digger" starring Tom Cruise: "The best film I've ever seen"

"Digger", the film by Alejandro González Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise, is dividing critics and struggling at the box office. But it has at least found an illustrious fan: Neil Young. The Canadian songwriter gave it a rave review: "The best film I've ever seen."

Young wrote about it on his online journal, the Neil Young Archives Times-Contrarian, in the Letters/Artists/Bandstand section. At the heart of his piece is also his disagreement with many of the published reviews: "It seems to me that they don't grasp the overall effect, and most of them are negative." For the musician, the unfavorable reviews fail to convey the scope of a work that invites viewers to discover it without preconceptions. His advice is to go to the cinema avoiding other reviews, and even forgetting his own. In his view, presenting "Digger" simply as a Tom Cruise movie risks creating the wrong expectations. Cruise plays the lead, but the project should be approached first and foremost as an auteur work, shot through with references to contemporary political and social reality. Iñárritu's narrative twists and stylistic choices may throw off anyone looking for conventional entertainment: Young identifies precisely this unpredictability as one of the reasons for its value.
According to the songwriter, the film portrays an all-too-recognizable world, dominated by politics and the pervasive presence of commerce—a familiarity that can even prevent viewers from seeing what's right in front of them. Through grotesque and satire, "Digger" tackles the relationship between ecological emergency, economic power and media spectacle.

"You have to watch it with an open mind," Young insists, urging audiences to stay in their seats even during moments when the story seems to lose momentum. His enthusiasm is directed above all at those who feel a lack of genuine engagement in today's cultural offerings. And he closes with an even blunter statement: "It's the greatest film, the greatest work of art I've ever seen, and that's just my opinion." This support comes at a difficult commercial moment for the film. About two weeks after its release, "Digger" has grossed roughly $38 million worldwide—a figure far from the $350 million that, according to estimates reported by Variety, would be needed to break even. It's also the last Warner Bros. release before the merger with Paramount, a circumstance Young reads as emblematic of the film industry's contradictions.

Neil Young thus joins other notable figures who have praised the film, including Jane Fonda, Guillermo del Toro and Anne Hathaway. His comments come as the Canadian Loner has also returned on the music front with "Second Song", his new album made together with Chrome Hearts. OndaRock recently devoted an in-depth playlist feature to him as part of our OndaTop series, titled "The 30 Best Neil Young Songs".

With "Digger", Alejandro González Iñárritu once again confronts the figure of a man who believes himself bigger than the world around him, building a grotesque parable about the fall of an oil magnate convinced he can still play the role of humanity's savior. Digger Rockwell, played by a Tom Cruise made unrecognizable under prosthetics, makeup and an imposing physical transformation, has through his own business contributed to the exploitation of the planet and the crisis that is driving it toward collapse; when the consequences of his actions become impossible to ignore, his first reaction is not to question his own responsibility, but to reassert his own centrality. The idea already contains the satirical core of the film: the man who built his fortune digging into the depths of the earth claims to also be the one who can save it.
Iñárritu's new film thus falls within a filmography populated by titanic protagonists, individuals convinced they can pit their own exceptionalism against the precariousness of existence, and destined, sooner or later, to face failure.

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