Trailers are often unreliable indicators, but the new Digger trailer seems to suggest one thing fairly clearly: It’s way too emphatic, shouty and table-pounding to warrant a comparison to Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove.
The trailer also persuades that the heavily made-up Tom Cruise now looks like Bob Odenkirk im Better Call Saul.
It also suggests that John Goodman‘s performance as the U.S. Presaident may emerge as an award-season standout.
Back to Strangelove: While the characters in Kubrick’s 1964 doomsday classic have their moments of eccentricity and even edgy derangement, the tone of the film is mostly one of sincere, no-bullshit, matter-of-fact realism.
Starting a nuclear war over the Russians having allegedly poisoned our bodily fluids is ridiculous, but the rationales, responses to and collateral discussions about an impending nuclear disaster are spoken straight from the shoulder.
Strangelove is mostly a low-key, plain-spoken thing. Shouting happens but sparely — only during moments of peak anxiety.
Whatever Digger turns out to be, there’s certainly a lot of shouting in the trailer. The tone is quite broad.
AI sez: “Costar Jesse Plemons sparked the Strangelove comparison in a January 2026 chat with Variety‘s Clayton Davis. He characterized the Digger script as as ‘one of the strangest, funniest, and most tragic’ he’s ever read.
The “absurd savior” premise: Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a highly eccentric elite who unleashes a global disaster. He then embarks on a frantic, counterproductive mission to prove he is humanity’s savior while wealthy elites and world leaders scramble, ultimately making the catastrophe dramatically worse.
The financial absurdity aspect: Trailers showcase the Strangelove-ian bureaucratic madness, with characters calculating the damage in trillions of dollars while entirely downplaying the immediate threat to actual human lives.
