Tom Cruise’s Digger Exposes the Fools, the Billionaires, and the Biggest Climate Lie of All

by | Oct 20, 2026 | Climate & Environment

Photo by Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

Tom Cruise’s Digger Exposes the Fools, the Billionaires, and the Biggest Climate Lie of All

by | Oct 20, 2026 | Climate & Environment

Photo by Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

The explosive new film reveals how fossil fuel billionaires concealed the truth, bought political protection, and then blamed ordinary Americans for the destruction they helped create.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

Louise and I went to see Digger this weekend. Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.

That Tom Cruise made the movie at all blew my mind; this guy has spent his entire career being the most apolitical no-issues superstar in Hollywood. Something has shifted when that guy puts on a fat suit and a tangle of white hair to play a Texas oil baron who wrecks the planet.

Digger is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made the movie The Revenant that won Leonardo DiCaprio—who is an outspoken advocate for climate action—an Oscar. Now it looks like Cruise has jumped on board, making what’s probably the best movie about climate change in a generation.

There’s been a concerted effort by rightwingers to convince you not to see the movie. Back in July, nearly 3 months before its release, a columnist at American Greatness was already warning Cruise’s “red-state base” that this was “yet another Hollywood feature warning us to treat Mother Nature with care… or else.”

Two days before it opened, Breitbart’s John Nolte, who in the same column calls climate change a “hoax,” dismissed it as an “attack on those of us who dare to use oil to better our lives” that “shames us for our standard of living, which is a direct result of the oil industry.” (He admits he’s working from other people’s reviews.) And the rightwing bots on social media have been going nuts, calling it “woke.”

It all probably parallels the Meta shutdown of No Kings this weekend, along with the billionaire-owned social media platforms’ refusal to advertise and apparent shadow banning of conversations about the new movies about Musk and Zuck.

For most of the first two-thirds of Digger I was mystified about this loud, deliberately—but still entertainingly—cartoonish satire; I wasn’t sure what kind of movie I was watching, and suspending disbelief was pretty much impossible.

But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing (I’m not going to give it away) and left me—and the audience in the theater with me, who sat in shocked silence at the end—astonished at how elegantly the entire thing was put together.

The movie in many ways reminded me of Dr. Strangelove and Network (both also criticized by rightwingers): it has that kind of impact and some truly great bits of dialogue that are right up there with Slim Pickens’s character and Peter Finch as Howard Beale.

That’s mostly when the oil baron Cruise plays owns up to everything: the lies, the bought-off politicians, the decades of knowing what they were doing to the atmosphere while lying to all of us about it. But then he turns the accusation around and suddenly the entire audience for his monologue is stunned.

He lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi—that they drilled and sold us oil because we demanded they do it—that I’ve been pointing to ever since 1998 when I published the first edition of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

The book’s premise is simple and echoes the movie: for most of humanity’s history we lived off “current sunlight” captured by plants and turned into food we ate (and food for the animals we ate) and the wood we used to build with and heat our homes.

Then about 900 years ago we found coal, and a century-and-a-half ago oil, and we started burning through sunlight that had been captured by plants literally millions of years ago, then turned by time and pressure into coal, oil, and methane. As I wrote then:

“This represents a critical moment in human history, for this is when our ancestors started living off our planet’s sunlight savings. Because our ancestors could consume sunlight that had been stored by plants millions of years ago, they began for the first time to consume more resources, in food, heat, and other materials, than the daily amount of sunlight falling locally on our planet had historically been able to provide.”

It turns out that the “cheap energy” Digger claims we all demanded was actually never cheap; it was an inheritance from our planet and instead of conserving or carefully using it we’ve been burning through it like there’s no tomorrow. I wrote in that same book that “the availability of a fuel leads to a population that depends on it and will suffer if it is taken away.”

They encouraged building suburbs around gas stations, and are now trying to blame the drivers for wanting the gasoline. They bought up the streetcar lines, lobbied rail into a mere drop in our transportation pool, and spent fifty years lying to us about what they knew their product would do to our planet.

Hell, BP’s ad agency literally invented the “personal carbon footprint” in 2004 so that you’d feel guilty about your commute instead of angry at them. When I revised the book in 2017, I put it this way:

“The ability to buy politicians and to dump billions of dollars a year into political campaigns and into a concerted disinformation campaign is a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s business model. The longer that fossil-fuel companies and the politicians whom they own muddy the waters, the longer they can reap easy profits selling cheap oil, no matter how many people die or how much it costs the public.”

As Digger says in the movie:

“If you can’t control the course of nature, at least you can control the narrative.”

Are Cruise and Iñárritu endorsing that alibi or exposing it? At times it’s hard to tell, but the importance of story—the power of story to change our culture itself—is where this movie is so important. As I wrote in Last Hours:

“Every time a culture has been transformed, since or before then and for better or worse, it’s been because of an idea, an insight, a new understanding of how things are, and of what is possible. Ideas preceded every revolution, every war, every transformation, and every invention. So, the good news is that if we redefine our cultural norms, retell the stories that make up the reality we follow, then humanity’s behaviors will change to conform to the new stories.”

Just like Dr. Strangelove prophesied Trump/Hegseth and Network predicted the Ellison’s buying up our media landscape, this movie is pointing to the next stage of our future, when fossil fuel barons both own the country and have—unapologetically—destroyed it.

So go see the movie before it’s gone, buried in rightwing slanders. Then call your elected representatives (202-224-3121) and ask them if they’re taking money from the fossil fuel industry or its apologists. And pass this “review” along to somebody who was planning to skip the film.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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