Apparently Tom Cruise (AKA Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, which we didn’t know) has made a hectoring movie about climate. Apparently his other films have thus far grossed over 13.3 billion total. But not this time. Breitbart News trumpeted “Global Warming Screed ‘Digger’ Projected to Become Biggest Bomb Ever” which would actually be something of an achievement, though not one to boast about. But the New York Times urges us to like it no matter how bad it is because it hews to the Party line and conformity trumps art as it trumps independent thought. Audiences don’t seem to agree.

Apparently the film cost almost $300 million to make and promote. But is unlikely to earn $100 million of which the theatres get half. And as Breitbart sneered:

“Who was this movie made for? Who’s the audience for an ugly-looking movie that uglies up a major American movie star in a movie trailer where everyone’s using their outdoor voice in the most obnoxious and smug way imaginable?”

A fair question. And the answer seems to be the imaginary public so committed to the cause that they don’t care if a movie is good as long as it’s well-meaning.

Hence the New York Times “The Morning” chide-pleaded:

“The Tom Cruise film ‘Digger’ bombed at the box office. David Gelles, host of our climate newsletter, says it should nonetheless be recognized for its go-for-broke attempt to dramatize the catastrophic effects of climate change.”

As one supposes with Soviet cinema, where you weren’t meant to care if a biographical trilogy on Lenin was poorly scripted, badly acted, feebly edited and unendurably protracted since it praised Lenin.

So what is Gelles’ argument? Um it’s:

“‘Digger,’ the new film by Alejandro G. Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise, has drawn mostly savage reviews. Critics have pounced on the writing, the acting, the production, the structure. Every aspect of it. But whatever you think of ‘Digger,’ one thing about it can’t be ignored: It is a climate movie.”

As one might say of Plan 9 from Outer Space: “It is a horror movie.” And get the reply “Yes, but it’s not Psycho.” But where Plan 9 was made on a shoestring by a director who was washed up without ever having been successful and later turned to “sexploitation” horror-porn, and featured footage from a burned-out Bela Lugosi shot for a totally different project, this one’s by a major studio with a huge action star. Indeed, as Gelles adds, as if it made it better not worse:

“In fact, ‘Digger’ is one of the biggest-budget, widest-release, starriest pieces of climate media ever made.”

So what’s their excuse? For him it’s left-wing propaganda, that’s what:

“Because despite whatever else is going on with the film, ‘Digger’ is one of the most audacious attempts yet to communicate the causes of global warming, its potentially catastrophic effects and who is to blame.”

Far from being audacious, climate doom propaganda is so trendy critics have assumed Cruise chose the storyline to boost his chances at finally winning an Oscar. In the wake of Al Gore’s An Inaccurate Truth, thirty-plus years of IPCC reports, billions of dollars of activism and a string of climate finger-wagging snoozefests the only audacious thing is claiming the world needs to hear more about it. Yes, somehow Cruise teamed up with a director who holds just that view. Gelles quotes the director that back in 2015:

“Greenland was not in the conversation; methane was not in the mainstream language of the media. Now, methane is one of the biggest monsters ever.”

Attack of the Giant Methane! Or perhaps Heroic Little Sisters of the Mongolian Grassland or The Seven Brave Tractor Drivers. Though if you were to, say, do an online search for Greenland and climate you would not find that the place was terra incognita or indicta back then or that methane was a hidden gas. (For instance here’s NOAA from Dec. 11 2015: “Surface melting affected more than half of Greenland Ice Sheet in 2015” and “If the Greenland Ice Sheet were to melt away completely, ocean level would rise roughly 23 feet (7 meters). So scientists have good reason to watch Greenland melt closely.” And here’s the start of a paper in Ecosystem Health and Sustainability from March 16 2015: “Greenhouse gas (GHG)-induced climate change is among the most pressing sustainability challenges facing humanity today, posing serious risks for ecosystem health. Methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are the two most important GHGs after carbon dioxide”.)

What Gelles calls “climate media” is a singularly costly and dud-filled genre. For instance Don’t Look Up or The Day After Tomorrow, both with big budgets, a chichi Hollywood A-list cast, and gall to spare. Of the latter Gelles writes:

“‘The Day After Tomorrow,’ from 2004, imagined what might happen when the conveyor belt of ocean currents that carries warm water toward Northern Europe falters. (Spoiler alert: The Northern Hemisphere is plunged into a new ice age overnight.) When ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ came out, that scenario was squarely in the realm of science fiction. But today, scientists are mounting an urgent effort to understand just how fast those currents, known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, are changing, and whether a rapid change in Europe’s climate could occur this century.”

Unless it doesn’t. (And if you care about facts, AMOC scaremongering was as shrill in 2015 as today, and as speculative.) But apparently if you’re in the climate cult, even a terrible film saying all the same stuff again is an instant classic because it says all the same stuff again. Oh, and Gelles is happy because:

“More climate films are on the way, including ‘A Statement’ this fall. The film, starring Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti, dramatizes a real-life 1980 meeting in Florida at which 20 experts discussed what to do about global warming. Nearly half a century after that meeting, the world is still trying to coordinate an effective response.”

Which you might think would itself be a satire, except satire can’t keep up. Including with:

“‘This film is a disaster movie,’ Iñárritu said of ‘Digger.’ ‘But the disaster is us.’”

Yes. You as in filmmakers who created this movie disaster. And as George Orwell said long ago, “ALL ART is propaganda but not all propaganda is art.”

The cross-town New York Sun certainly wasn’t buying this clunky effort:

“The complete commercial failure of ‘Digger,’ Tom Cruise’s biggest flop in two decades and potentially of all time, can be ascribed to several factors. It is a difficult arthouse film, like most of its director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s work, masquerading as a laugh-out-loud mainstream comedy. Imagine Tarkovsky’s ‘The Sacrifice’ coming on like Ben Stiller’s ‘Tropic Thunder,’ and you have an idea of how total the gap between audience expectations engendered by the early marketing and the finished product is.”

If anything, the whole production team were invoking Conquest’s Second Law that the best way to explain the behaviour of any large bureaucratic organization is to assume that it’s secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. Indeed, the Sun added:

“It is an extraordinary exercise in wrong-footing viewers, so much so that there is a valid argument to be made that around 80% of the film is deliberately bad, in terms of the OTT performances, clunky dialogue, and headache-inducing thematic assault on various social sacred cows. This, naturally, makes it neither a good film nor, as it turns out, a successful one.”

Still, if you missed Leonardo DiCaprio’s trite Before the Flood, which unsurprisingly “received mostly positive reviews from critics” despite being wildly inaccurate, including that as Wikipedia says “The film covers effects of climate change in various regions of the world” whereas climate change is a series of effects not a cause, you can watch this film and pine for the clarity and uplift of Ingmar Bergman.

We won’t give a plot spoiler, not least because after the Sun did we were too confused to be in any position to and we’re certainly not about to pay to see it in hopes of finding out. But we will mention that this last Warner Bros. production before the merger with Paramount to form “Skydance” (do not try this at home) was such a mess, the film and the marketing, that on the way out Warner disposed of both its “visionary chairs”.

That Hollywood has lost its way, including Disney, is not news. The more woke they get, the less people like their films. As Breitbart also suggested:

“Maybe make movies for Normal People? Just an idea.”

The problem is, they think they are.