I sat in the theatre for Digger with about 4 other people, one of whom was the friend I came in with. This movie is clearly for someone, I heard the guy in the back laugh at loud at some of the slapstick moments, but it isn’t for me and by audience reviews and the empty theatre I watched it in, it isn’t for most people either.

Things started bad when out villain protagonist wakes up with his cat. As a cat lover myself, this should have been a moment to pull me into the movie, to show cute humor and tug on my heartstring. But as a cat owner, or even just someone who’s seen a cat in person, all I could think was that the cat looked incredibly uncanny valley. I guess a real cat would have been too hard to train, or wouldn’t have worked live on set. But whatever puppetry/CGI they used just kicked me out of the movie before the plot even began. My mind went “oh right, this is a movie,” I wasn’t immersed in it at all.

Things stayed pretty boring in the first act as the titular character Digger dealt with the central conflict that would define this movie. I couldn’t help but notice how all the villain protagonists of Digger had southern accents while the slightly more heroic figures (the climate scientists etc) had either northern or western American accents. The movie completely kicked me out of it however after the first act ended though.

Warning, here be spoilers.

Digger meets the president and cabinet to discuss how a massive ice shelf has broken off of Greenland and is headed straight for Europe. The ice shelf is the size of a large city, and with so much volume it won’t just crash into a seaside town, it will bring with it a tsunami when it hits the shore. Noticeably the president and his cabinet are all old white men. It fits the vague Hollywood stereotype that bad things are done by white men and good things are done by women and minorities, but it was an incongruity with reality that actually brought me out of the movie.

If this evil Republican president and his cabinet are some ersatz of the Bush administration, then where are Bush’s black and female advisors, like Colin Powell and Condy Rice. If this is the Trump admin, then where are all the young women advisors that political reporters are implying Trump is sleeping with, as these reporters do their best to turn once respected news orgs into TMZ.

This all white administration isn’t a black mirror pointed at our own world, it’s a bad joke from a 90s SNL sketch, or the daily show if it had zero self awareness. The movie wants its audience to be well read enough that they’re worried about climate change, but not well read enough to know anything about modern American politics.

And if this cabinet isn’t an ersatz Bush or Trump, it still makes no sense for a Republican cabinet to not include a few women and minorities. This kind of thing is noticeable to anyone who has watched the news, you could only believe this is an accurate pastiche of reality if you get all your politics from Tumblr.

Digger as a movie was described to me as a modern Dr Strangelove, but Dr Strangelove was clearly holding a mirror up to modern society it was set in, 1960s America. If the good Dr Strangelove had been a southern accented woman instead of a Nazi German scientist, it wouldn’t have landed as a parody of the American missile program and Werner Von Braun in particular.

After Digger’s terribly unfunny cabinet scene, we get to the scene that kicked me completely out of the movie. This movie isn’t even pretending to be real, it’s a play being put on. The main actor playing Digger goes back to his dressing room and his wife and daughter have their own boring subplot. The drama of a massive iceberg and tsunami crashing into Europe is brushed aside because none of this is real.

I think the writer or director of Digger had seen a lot of Mel Brooks movies, because this feels like a Mel Brooks moment. Robinhood reading the script, “why are you moving camera right” in the Producers, that kind of joke. But Robinhood Men in Tights wasn’t trying to moralize about climate change. Again, going back to Dr Strangelove, the themes of MAD being a self destructive policy would have been severely undercut if the movie had broken the fourth wall every now and then to show Peter Sellers practicing his lines.

After a bit more back and forth we come to the scene that made me tap out and leave the theatre to get a meal. Digger and the cabinet set up a conference room to watch the iceberg and tsunami destroy the Netherlands. Again, the director thought they were being extremely clever here; we don’t actually see any of the destruction porn that you’d usually find in a Roland Emmerich film. Instead, we watch the reactions from the cabinet as they watch the destruction.

This is clever, but it’s also boring. The reactions from the cabinet aren’t funny. Roland Emmerich films have a large if niche following because no matter how campy or badly written they are, they’re always a visual treat. This isn’t a visual treat, and it’s campy and badly written.

Let me finish with a thought I’ve had for a while: if I were a comedian, what do I think the easiest gig in the world would be? The Democratic National Convention. Or the Republican National Convention but I probably wouldn’t get invited to that one.

The DNC is the easiest gig in the world because the audience is already primed to clap for the things they agree with. They are also all members of a political party, so they are self-selected to all agree about the same things, and those are things you the comedian already know about, because you know you were booked for the DNC and not the RNC.

The point I’m making is that this would be a very easy gig as an entertainer. Say some biting comments about Trump and the GOP, with the kind of sarcasm and crassness you’d see in a reddit comment or a twitter tweet. Insert plenty of profanity because you’re a comedian, not a politician, and then bask in the applause.

The applause mind you, not the laughter. Applause is easy, just prime the audience to clap and then tell them what they already believe. Plenty of shows have made an industry out of this, finding that preaching is easier to joking, see for example the recent output from Steven Colbert.

This movie feels like it belongs at the DNC, not in a theatre. It feels like something that wants applause, not laughter. It’s telling you what you already believe, but with enough profanity and crassness that it technically qualifies as a comedy, but without any good jokes to make you actually laugh.

But I still want to laugh when I go to a comedy, not applaud. So I didn’t care for Digger.

I walked our soon after the scene where the fat cabinet member talks to the people of Europe, saying that America will stand with them. I walked out because I wasn’t having fun and thought writing a blog post would be more enjoyable. This movie is less fun than writing. Watch at your own risk.

7/10