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Once we find out it's a play, which is obvious because Cruise is clearly controlling a cat puppet with his hand, etc... the plot device used for slipping back into the material from the play is that they're doing a dress rehearsal. So we get an update on Cruise's personal life (think Birdman), he's working himself up about the performance and his family's well being and all these things. Then we slip into the next scene, and it's played straight, then back out, and so forth. The play itself comprises quite a bit of the film's actual runtime, but any steam it had, which is ultimately very little, is released by the reveal coming so early. We're now watching this crudely written and broadly performed thing knowing that it's just a dress rehearsal, so it loses any entertainment value it may have had at first. We're just... still watching it.

The director of the play even says late in the film that "Of course it's crude! Of course it's broad! But people love this play!" (paraphrasing) - why anyone thought any of this was a good idea is above and beyond my pay grade.

so it sounds like Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play (which will soon be a Boots Riley film) but worse

with the stage-like curtain (repeated at the climax), the exaggerated visuals outside the mansion, and Cruise' lightning-fast quick-changes as he dresses. (The cat puppet is a little silly, but it didn't look remarkably bad, even in IMAX.) You wouldn't exactly know before the reveal, but your brain has been primed to recognize that something is off before the tree snaps.

The real barrier to enjoyment when it comes to this movie is its tonal approach more than anything related to whether one has been spoiled re: the play. This is really one of the most difficult big-budget studio films released in recent years, and the reports of mass walkouts/negative responses make more sense when the viewer understands that mainstream audiences were sold a comedy and delivered an uncomfortable, existential dissection of modern environmental hypocrisy through the flawed lens of art. That the (too) extended Fossil Fools sequences are broad, crude, scatological, and altogether unfunny is an accurate assessment, though it would only be a useful critique if I believed they were intended to be funny to us, the audience of the film. (The movie honestly could have stood some more humor, but I get why that isn't the point).

Let me back up for a second. I've seen many comparisons of this film to other films (Birdman, Synecdoche, New York, Noises Off, most of Yorgos Lanthimos' recent work), many of which are fair, but the thing that kept recurring to me was a moment from an actual stage work, Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play, a connection that I see one board member above also independently drew. (Spoilers for that, I guess.) The three acts of this play concern a shifting group of characters that recount a Simpsons episode ("Cape Feare") after the apocalypse. Act I takes place in the present day, where a set of survivors bond by recounting the episode and its jokes; Act II 7 years from now, where a new, non-electric society has developed, and the survivors have branched into performing Simpsons "plays" as theatrical entertainment; and the bizarre Act III 75 years later, in which the text of the episode has radically shifted into a story about the very disaster that destroyed the world. There are two particularly important moments of comparison. First, as the rehearsals for the "play" break down in Act II of Mr Burns, one of the actors delivers a show-stopping monologue that "meaning" isn't of much interest in post-apocalyptic art, as brutal meaning (death and suffering) is everywhere; meaningless entertainment, on the other hand, is more interesting because it's by nature harder to accomplish. Second, as the extensive stage notes and directions for Mr Burns make clear, the point of Act II and especially Act III is to put on a show that would speak to the concerns of people of a radically different time, life experience, and standard of living than contemporary audiences. Digger makes sense (indeed, I think it only makes sense) if read from the same vantage points. Fossil Fools is written as a dumb comedy, but it doesn't actually play as one to the audience within the film. It is, rather, a method both of mocking the people that caused the current dystopic society and a vehicle for pseudo-pornographic depictions of pleasures lost following the devolution of society. (To the second point, notice the fetishistic attention that the play pays to exotic foods and liquors - tuna tartare, good whiskey, Rockwell's breakdown when the oil rig's meat locker is raided - and the various elite contraptions, luxuries, and old works of art in Digger's mansion). All of the principal players in Fossil Fools are either well-known public figures (Digger and his family, the President and VP, Ganesh, who became famous through his testimony at the European tribunal thing) or else archetypes onto whom different kinds of responsibility or cathartic mockery can be projected (corporate and military yes-men, mostly). The real pleasure of the play-in-film for me was not the dumb jokes about asshole cancer or whatever, but came about in attempting to use the contents of the play as a method of mapping out what the Judy crisis actually looked like. It scratched an investigative rather than a satirical itch. Indeed, the broadness is in fact part of the point - everyone in-universe knows the deceased president's character traits (shouty old warmonger, went crazy at the end, Jesus freak, died of rectal cancer) and the play uses them to paint his character in broad strokes. That's why the play sequences are uncomfortable and arch rather than funny; they are the equivalent of watching a play from the far-closer perspective of a film viewer that can get closer to actors than any theatrical spectator.

Okay, the film is doing something: so what? Unlike a different recent film that I could name, one which cultivated an awareness of its form as a genre film for no other purpose than to engage in masturbatory self-recognition, Digger has a point aimed at us. Iñárritu is specifically adopting a worldview that is not anti-art, but is of the opinion that art in the abstract cannot save us from our own catastrophic failures. No matter how well we traduce our overlords or identify their weak points, we can't actually better the human condition if we don't harm or stop them directly. I disagree with mfunk's reading that Jesse Plemons' character is depicted with anything like sympathy or heroism or positive sentiments for financing the play. (If David Zaslav or whoever believed that was what the film was saying, well, that doesn't bear on the film itself and only reveals him to be as stupid as I already thought he was.) He is a tragic, pathetic figure, a helpless bystander as a child to the events that somehow broke the world, engaging in something akin either to exposure therapy or self-medication of his trauma in restaging his tragic upbringing as farce. That he is kind to Cruise's actor and redirects the rehearsal when it goes south is an indication of single-minded symptomatic drive rather than benevolence or unexamined acceptance of the power of art. Digger's most important monologue, the extended self-aggrandizing speech at the Eurotribunal, is to the in-film audience a riotous attempt to shift the blame through the fourth wall, but is an essentially true if fallacious tu quoque from our perspective. We remain accomplices in our own societal downfall. Digger's watery suicide, highlighted by a tableau, is catharsis to the theatrical spectator, but subverted catharsis to the cinematic counterpart: we see the wires and know it's fake, an exaggerated representation of a sad possibility if the end does come and Sam Altman seals himself in his bunker. Iñárritu's film is not coterminous with apocalypse porn dreck like Don't Look Up, but argues, rather that such art is solipsistic and self-defeating. The same is true for the inevitable popular-film attempts to explore the political and capitalist overlords that are currently trying to ruin society from which Digger's traits are drawn: Trump, Musk, George W. Bush, and, of those who already have films made about them, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg.

I like Digger, but not that much, and I certainly don't think it's a masterpiece or anything. These are not new topics, or new approaches to them, nor does Iñárritu run through this material with an enormous amount of novelty. The film was also technically overproduced to an absurd degree. This is the second VistaVision-shot movie I've seen (see also: "Wuthering Heights") that fails to use the large format and its specific strengths and limitations for any real purpose. Really, the most perplexing thing about Digger is not so much that it exists or was funded by a studio, but rather that it was made and released as a gigantic tentpole. The actors' salaries and VistaVision film must have been by far the most expensive costs, so why spend them for a film that doesn't really depend upon them? I mean, Cruise is quite good in a role that requires him to play to the rafters and embody all that is evil and false about industry, but was he necessary for this film to exist in a way that, say, DiCaprio and Penn were to One Battle After Another? I think if you swapped out Cruise for a lower-tier leading man willing to work for a low salary (like, a Michael Shannon-type?), got reliable character actors rather than big names cashing a paycheck for the smaller roles, and shot digitally, this could have been a mid-budget movie where all this nonsense about concealing the twist would be unnecessary and everyone watching the film would understand its ambitions and tactics. Of course, these kinds of movies are such rare birds nowadays, so from a strict production perspective the grand scale was likely a necessity to get the film greenlit. But it doesn't serve the film. At least the all-out, $300 million, shot-on-IMAX-on-location qualities of this year's Nolan film were an integral component of the pitch, even if I think Iñárritu's foppery is slightly more interesting than Southie Odysseus twanging his bow. I certainly do not get the sense that Iñárritu thinks he is himself above the criticism he presents in the film, which is fine.

Oh, and a note re: mfunk's objection concerning the existence of civilian air travel in the "real world" of the film: remember how much energy is expended upon carbon output/drilling being the least of humankind's concerns following the methane spill. I don't really think the specific science of the dystopic society matters beyond the establishment that it is dystopic, but there are evidently enough people/is enough technology on the street to suggest an autocracy rather than total social collapse. And evidently Plemons' character has been involved in moving people around to make the play work, so even if getting on a plane is prohibitively difficult for the average joe, he might well move heaven and earth to assuage his hand-picked leading man.

Final final critique of the criticism (this time not aimed at mfunk): a lot of social media reactions essentially boil down to "this film was boring and repetitive." This is true for Fossil Fools, but not if you're watching the movie attempting to read Fossil Fools as evidence for a certain societal path, which is what I think the film's real concern is. I also kind of view as suspect the number of film critics who have casually called the film "boring" as though the film not being maximally pleasurable and audience-friendly must be a fault of its design. Not sure why these same critics, many of whom love extending academic analytic techniques to junk food cinema with far less going on than this film, feel capable of conflating boredom and confusion with negative quality without considering whether the film might agree with them as far as Fossil Fools goes.

The lingering mystery of Jesse Plemons’ supposedly benevolent Megan Ellison type is part of that, but what’s stuck for me is how the frame narrative is so much Iñárritu playing his greatest hit until the ending shows where that leads: absolutely fucking nowhere. I do get the sense from his last two movies that, in addition to the megalomania needed to burn this much money for these end results, he really does carry some resentment about himself and his art and the response to that art. Never Cursed and I may never find common ground on the other new release he’s talking about/around, but I do think they share this artist’s instinct: an angry “is this what you fucking want from me?!” directed at the audience but saying as much or more about that person’s fraught relationship to their work. The difference is that one of those movies made that part of a sincerely emotional and dense experience for me, while the other is only that final note on the heels of two hours of one incessant note. But that is something, and I’d recommend anyone with an open mind try to wrestle with this ungodly thing to find similar reward.

I wonder if what drew Cruise to this is that it sounds like a Citizen Kane-style exploration of a character through the eyes of others. Or like a Dr Strangelove black comedy, but coming far too late to act as a warning, just as a self-comfort to those in the aftermath.

Though the above descriptions of the 'puppet cat' are also making me think of the Mel Gibson The Beaver film!

(and when I didn't like it, I wasn't supposed to anyways - which would be a cop-out without the total sincerity Iñárritu brings to the film's introspections). Oh how many lies he had to tell in order to get studio execs to buy into this destined (self-reflexive, in more ways than one) disaster pic

I can't imagine what drew him to the role (unless he's the only secret climate change activist in Hollywood) considering he's basically being asked to act funny, but not.. I don't think that's Tom's kinda challenge. I wonder if he believed to some degree that he was being funnier than he was (considering his promotions of the film, he seems to genuinely think that Digger is a fun and funny character, rather than a deliberately off-putting one). Iñárritu makes a lot of directorial choices here and across his filmography that I don't love, but he's got the juice and the tactics in exactly how he shoots this film to be unfunny are smart and smooth

Maybe a mention of her being a worse actor than the others or a producer’s hire would’ve lampshaded it, but then why would Plemons want his mom to be played this way?

I dunno, my takeaway from the ending is that it's probably no big deal for someone to get on an airplane in this vision of the future. The daughter says at one point that the small airport she's departing from "isn't even a real airport," implying that the gigantic crowded airports we know today are still a thing then. The wife also mentions that there are a substantial number of planes affected by the storm.

And this is crucial to the point the film is making because what we see after the play ends is people going out and living their lives like everything is normal. Oil is still probably pumping and planes are still flying and people still have their phones and liberal aesthetes are still going out to what they view as subversive progressive entertainment. I think the implication is that the Judy disaster kicked off even and even more desperate search for oil, and life more or less went on with the necessary adjustments. It's not like demand would have suddenly dried up.

It's funny, but of all the disastrous climate change predictions I've seen, this one seems the most realistic. People will die, and huge sections of the world may become terrible inhospitable places, but in the grand scheme of things, what's really going to change? Just as Digger says, people are addicted to their lifestyles and will resist change no matter how much they might claim to want it or how bad things get.