'Digger' Ending Explained: A Spoiler-Filled Breakdown of Tom Cruise's Wild New Movie

Let's talk Digger spoilers...

Digger is many things. It’s the first Tom Cruise movie in over a decade not to feature recognizable IP, fighter planes, or both. Its director Alejandro Iñárritu's biggest swing yet after divisive, high-brow films like Birdman and The Revenant. It’s a brutal condemnation of late-stage capitalism. It’s also a pretty clever magic trick.

Digger contains three big reveals that reshape our understanding of the movie in various ways. To really understand what Digger is about, you need to grapple with all three, and the way they fit together (both successfully and unsuccessfully) to tell a complex story about finding meaning at the end of the world.

(Also, if you're wondering whether Digger is a musical, you've come to the right place.)

Warning: full spoilers for Digger below.

Digger's first big twist ruins the movie

The first big reveal comes about 30 minutes into Digger. After meeting the aging oil baron Rockwell Digger (Cruise), we quickly learn that his Greenland drilling operation has accidentally dislodged a massive hunk of ice into the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s heading straight for Northern Europe. The U.S. President (John Goodman) and his cabinet show up at Digger’s mansion to discuss their best options (there are none). Then, as Digger and President Compson step aside into a private room to discuss other matters, Iñárritu plays his first trick: The majestic tree outside slowly tips over in front of them… and then a giant hand reaches out from behind the horizon to grab it.

Turns out, nothing we've seen up to this point is real. We're actually watching actors in the middle of a final rehearsal for an elaborate new play, which stars an actor named Curtis (Cruise) as Digger Rockwell. After a brief reset, the rehearsal continues, but from this point on, the scenes from the play are intercut with behind-the-scenes drama as Curtis clashes with his director and deals with a personal family crisis.

While Curtis prepares to take the stage in a starring role for what seems to be a major theatrical event, his daughter is flying home from Jamaica. They speak via FaceTime before she takes off, and she mentions a storm might delay the flight. Later, we learn the flight was diverted completely, and nobody knows where it landed. Curtis considers abandoning the play and heading home, but his wife convinces him to stay the course while she attempts to track down their missing daughter.

None of this really adds much to Digger's main plotline, which is the play within the movie. The story of Digger Rockwell still occupies most of the runtime and is mostly shot by Iñárritu to feel like some sort of heightened reality. You can sometimes see the seams of a theatrical production (like when an angry crowd in one scene is clearly filled out with life-sized dolls), but most of the time, it makes zero sense that this is ostensibly happening on a physical stage in an actual theater.

I'm not sure what the secondary plotline about Curtis' family is really meant to add to Digger. The detail of a hurricane seems like a gesture at the dangers of man-made climate change that the main plotline is all about, but it doesn't contribute much to an already high-stakes story. At the same time, revealing that Digger is actually just an awkward actor named Curtis undercuts Cruise's entire performance. It's a lot less fun to see the movie star swagger and bluster and monologue when we know he's just putting on a show even within the world of the movie.

However, there's a second reveal, much closer to the end of the film, that won me over to Digger's entire gimmick.

Digger's second big twist saves it

Throughout Digger, Curtis is constantly being accosted by Kenny, a mysterious weirdo played by Jesse Plemons who's lurking around on set and seems to be the money behind the entire production. At one point, Kenny reveals he runs some sort of intelligence company and offers to help find Curtis' daughter. However, it's only near the end of the film that we learn his true role.

While rehearsing a scene where Digger, President Compson, and the vice president all board Air Force One to oversee the bombing of a second errant iceberg, Curtis completely loses it. To be fair, the scene is ridiculous, with the VP (Michael Stuhlbarg) skipping around on the plane and shouting "Yippee" as rockets blast the city-sized iceberg into smaller (but still massive) chunks. Curtis complains to the director that the president and vice president would never be on a plane together for safety purposes, and also that none of the three characters were anywhere near this event when it happened in real life.

That alone is a big reveal. For the first time, almost two hours into the movie, we learn that the events we're watching aren't just a satirical play about climate change, they're a satirical reenactment of an apocalyptic event that actually occurred within the world of Digger. But before this revelation can even sink in, Kenny intervenes.

The monologue that Plemmons delivers next is perhaps the most important part of the entire movie. He reveals that he is actually Kenny Rockwell, the nephew of Digger, played by a young boy in the play within the movie. Kenny explains that he first saw this play, which is titled Fossil Fools, at a small theater in London where it was performed by three actors who took turns delivering monologues. Fossil Fools became a cult classic for its darkly comedic take on a real-life apocalyptic event (the first iceberg kills millions, the second crashes into Alaska and completely reshapes the Earth's climate). So he bought the rights to the play and funded an elaborate performance with the best actors and director he could find.

For Kenny, the reason to do all this goes back to his experience the first time he saw Fossil Fools. At the end of that performance, the entire theater broke out into applause and laughter despite the horrors of what they'd all experienced in real life. He wants to give people a reason to go out and laugh in a world that's seemingly much worse than the one we're living in today.

This second reveal, that Digger takes place in a world where everything we've been watching already happened, reorients the entire movie. It suddenly makes sense why Curtis is so uncomfortable about the performance. The play isn't just some weird thought experiment; It's an extremely dark reflection of reality. In this moment, Iñárritu redeems Digger by making that second layer of plot actually mean something. It's not just a clever twist for the sake of being clever, it's a brutally dark reveal that redefines every single scene we've watched up to that point.

After Kenny's big speech, Digger is basically finished, but there's one more moment worth talking about.

One final reveal

The rehearsal resumes and we watch Digger Rockwell's final moments play out, exiled to an old oil rig in the now-summery arctic with his family while the world seemingly burns. Digger dies, and suddenly, the previously empty theater is full of a cheering crowd.

Then a siren blares as the theater doors open, revealing a smoggy world outside. Everyone in the audience simultaneously pulls out sleek, high-tech air-filter masks and slowly files out.

Iñárritu cuts to the exterior of the theater to reveal a billboard announcing the 25th anniversary performance of Fossil Fools. Then he pans slowly to reveal a disturbing, post-apocalyptic city. The sky is grey, the streets are flooded, and heavily armed soldiers patrol every corner. It's a striking image that feels like a preview of our own not-so-distant future. But in Digger, it's a final reminder that even when the world ends and society collapses, we'll still need to find a way to entertain ourselves and laugh through our misery.

So wait, is Digger a musical?

Oh, right. No, Digger is not even the slightest bit of a musical.

Then again, given the whole play-within-a-movie premise, a Digger musical actually kind of makes sense within the film's universe. It's probably only a matter of time before the cult classic play gets adapted into a Broadway show with catchy songs about oil and icebergs.

I doubt we'll ever get to see that musical IRL, but stranger things have happened.