Why Seeing ‘Digger’ in VistaVision Could Change Your Mind About the Tom Cruise Box Office Flop

Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Digger.” In the two-and-a-half weeks since Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s “Digger” opened in theaters, it has already taken on a mythic status that goes beyond, and, in most viewers’ minds, completely obliterates, the movie’s actual content. In keeping with the film‘s maximalist vibe, the noise around it keeps whipsawing in different directions, with defenders calling it a misunderstood masterpiece and detractors equally fervent in calling it a complete artistic disaster. Even before the movie was released, the polarities emerged. On the one hand, many speculated about Tom Cruise‘s wild performance in the title role as a brash, eccentric oil tycoon responsible for an environmental disaster. Early reports said Cruise was back in “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Magnolia” mode, giving an ambitious, audacious performance for an auteur filmmaker that could possibly earn him his fifth Oscar nomination. Whether or not Cruise gets his (strongly deserved) Academy Award nomination for the movie, the rumors of his big swing proved accurate once audiences finally saw “Digger.” So, unfortunately, the rumors that the movie would be a financial bomb proved true: a big-budget experiment projected to open the lowest of any Tom Cruise star vehicle in over 40 years. The glee with which some commentators reported on this was a little mystifying to me. Even if you hate “Digger,” the conservatism its commercial failure encourages on the part of the studios can only be depressing. (If you complain about too many sequels and IP-based movies but reveled in Iñárritu flopping, you’re part of the problem.) Then again, I was one of the viewers completely taken in by Iñárritu’s bold, expansive vision and Cruise’s fearless performance. I called the movie a masterpiece when I wrote about it here, and two subsequent viewings have only reinforced my stance. When the movie opened, the extreme reactions on all sides came so fast and with such fury that it was a little dizzying. Most critics either loved it or hated it, and they were split right down the middle, with a Tomatometer rating that has fluctuated around 50% since the film’s release. (The division holds here at IndieWire, where the movie has both partisans and haters, though I’ll admit I’m probably the most effusive in my praise.) On social media, the movie caught fire in a way that belied its anemic box office On X and Letterboxd, there was a lively, pervasive, and often obnoxious debate over the film’s merits, and the heat only intensified when Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, the studio executives who greenlit “Digger,” were fired by incoming commandant David Ellison the week the movie opened. If you liked “Digger,” it was no longer just a good movie — it was a symbol of all that was right with the risk-taking De Luca-Abdy regime, and everything likely to be wrong with the Skydance takeover of Warners (a stance bolstered by the announcement of Ellison’s first two projects, reboots of “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers”). The Warner Bros. marketing department tried to turn the divisiveness to their advantage, running ads that included both the movie’s raves and pans, both from traditional critics and across social media. The conceit didn’t really work. Sadly, at this point it’s clear that “Digger” is destined to be one of those movies, like “Heaven’s Gate,” “Ishtar,” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” whose catastrophic box office results make it synonymous with disaster. Ultimately, both “Heaven’s Gate” and “Ishtar” found the redemption they always deserved: Michael Cimino’s savagely subversive Western entered the Criterion Collection, and Elaine May’s equally scathing skewering of both male friendship and Reagan administration foreign policy was embraced by a new generation of cinephiles. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both of these films, and “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Digger,” are all overtly political movies filled with prickly ideas — somehow flops that have something on their mind are always more vociferously punished than more blatantly capitalist enterprises that crash and burn like “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” or “Sahara.” What’s interesting about “Digger” — and this probably says more about the current media landscape and entertainment ecosystem than about the movie itself — is that the decades-long back-and-forth reevaluation “Heaven’s Gate” and “Ishtar” went through happened in days. “Digger” hadn’t even come out, and impassioned revisionist retorts to the negative reviews were already circulating. A few days after release, it had catapulted to the most-rated and most-discussed movie on Letterboxd, even though most people weren’t going to see it as a new release. A lot of the interest in “Digger” has been driven by fetishistic cinephiles, which makes it a little surprising to me that so little has been made of the film’s VistaVision engagements. You can read a detailed explanation of the format here, but the salient point about VistaVision is that it’s a 35mm format that essentially doubles the size of the negative by running the film through the camera — and, in true VistaVision exhibition, the projector — horizontally rather than vertically. After its initial glory days in the 1950s and 1960s, when directors like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford shot some of their best films in the format, VistaVision mostly disappeared as a primary capture medium for decades. In recent years, however, directors like Paul Thomas Anderson (“One Battle After Another”) and Yorgos Lanthimos (“Bugonia”) have embraced the format and highlighted its superior image quality. It’s still rare and somewhat challenging to use, with only a handful of working cameras — one of which is owned by actor and cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. Ribisi loaned his camera to both Anderson and Iñárritu for “Digger,” and Iñárritu and Cruise made a point of extolling VistaVision’s virtues on their press tour, stressing the increased detail and depth of field the format enabled. Yet somehow, the fact that only a handful of venues are projecting “Digger” in true VistaVision hasn’t been widely publicized the way it was when Anderson did the same thing with “One Battle After Another.” When that movie opened in VistaVision at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theater in Los Angeles, the Regal Union Square in New York, and a few other locations, it was treated as a major event, since it meant that Anderson’s film was the first film to be shot in VistaVision and projected in VistaVision since Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks” over 50 years ago. At least five VistaVision prints have been struck for “Digger,” but the VistaVision engagements have been much less hyped than those of “One Battle After Another.” Even though “One Battle” had the novelty of being first, the muted response is still a little weird given that VistaVision is the only way to actually see this movie that was shot on celluloid projected on film (“One Battle,” on the other hand, offered a variety of celluloid options). It’s also weird because VistaVision is, if you’re lucky enough to live in one of the five cities currently playing “Digger,” by far and away the best way to see the movie — a gorgeous, immersive presentation with more texture and subtlety than the digital IMAX engagements that represent the next best option. Evidence that “Digger” has been claimed by discerning cinephiles was on display when I caught an afternoon VistaVision show at the AMC Grove in Los Angeles this weekend; though the movie had reportedly plummeted to number eight on the box office charts in its second week, my screening was nearly sold out — and so were most of the other VistaVision screenings this weekend. That gives me hope that “Digger” will hang on in VistaVision for another couple of weeks, but I still wouldn’t sleep on it — if you live near the Grove, the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London, the AMC Lincoln Square in New York, the Sun in Melbourne or Coolidge Corner in Boston, run to see “Digger” in VistaVision while you still can. That’s because the combined quality of the light hitting celluloid with the increased resolution gives you the best of both worlds: the inviting, textured nature of film and the sharp, granular precision of digital. I had seen “Digger” twice before my third viewing in VistaVision, and this time I noticed details in the frame that simply looked different and better in VistaVision — the colors were more nuanced, with more gradations across the palette, and the minutiae of the production design in the dense sets popped in a way that wasn’t evident even in digital IMAX. ‘Digger’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection The most surprising thing, however, was how well VistaVision served the performances. The format treats skin tones differently than digital IMAX, finding more warmth while also playing up the blue-gray pallor that extends the often chilly cinematography. One might think premium formats are all about the epic, but in this case — much as in the 70mm IMAX close-ups of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” — the most stunning effects are in the intimate sequences, where the greatness and subtlety of Cruise’s performance become even more obvious. In VistaVision, Cruise’s power comes less from his turn as Digger than from his turn as Curtis Markson, the beleaguered actor playing Digger in the play within the film. Digger gets the broad gestures and colorful lines, but Curtis is where Cruise really shows he’s one of our greatest actors and one of our most charismatic movie stars; in VistaVision, the slightest shift of his eyes or the grimace around his lips reveals the tension bubbling inside the character. In some moments, Cruise seems to act not through his makeup but with it, using the wrinkles and stringy hair to convey sadness, resignation, worry, and anger with such delicacy that I still can’t figure out exactly what he was doing or how he did it. The VistaVision close-ups of Cruise made me understand, more than ever, what Ingmar Bergman meant when he called the human face a landscape; there’s something more wistful and melancholy about the performances, and the film as a whole, in this format. Which isn’t to say that the epic spectacle of “Digger” — the theatrical sets, the images of environmental destruction, etc. — isn’t also made better by VistaVision. In fact, the movie represents the latest step in the evolution of epic filmmaking, continuing the process Nolan began 18 years ago in the opening bank heist sequence of “The Dark Knight.” For the previous 60 or so years, increased scale meant a wider frame — CinemaScope or Panavision or an equivalent widescreen process where the image was roughly twice as wide as it was high, maybe even wider. This was the norm, from classical Hollywood epics like “El Cid” and “King of Kings” to later adventure hits such as “Die Hard” and “Independence Day.” As the first studio feature to use 70mm IMAX cameras with a 1.43:1 aspect ratio, “The Dark Knight” changed that, associating the epic with a tall frame rather than a wide one. This made sense for a few reasons, not least of which was that most multiplexes weren’t built to optimize CinemaScope releases. In recent decades, our boxy theaters have meant that the screen got smaller, not bigger, to accommodate widescreen presentations — instead of the screen growing outward to the left and right as intended, multiplex venues had to mask the top and bottom of the frame to preserve the original dimensions in theaters not designed to facilitate them. A widescreen movie was no longer immersive in the way Martin Scorsese has often described biblical epics of his youth like “The Robe.” Instead, it became like watching slightly larger letterboxed television. Nolan’s embrace of IMAX perfectly fit our new reality, ensuring that the maximum amount of wall space in the theater would be used. Purists like Quentin Tarantino might shoot “The Hateful Eight” in the super-wide 70mm aspect ratio favored by David Lean, but for the most part we’re all living in Nolan’s world now — and we were even before “The Dark Knight.” It’s just that filmmakers weren’t savvy enough (and studios weren’t yet economically motivated by the soon-to-come inflated IMAX ticket prices) to make the new reality of narrower screening venues work for them. Certainly, the VistaVision presentation of “Digger,” screened in an IMAX-equivalent 1.5:1 aspect ratio, was a more all-encompassing visual experience than I’m used to at the Grove when I see something in a more traditional 1.85 or 2.40 aspect ratio. And even if you see “Digger” in IMAX, you’re not guaranteed to see it in its proper form—only IMAX screens with dual laser projection match the original image, while standard IMAX venues show the movie in a compromised 1.90:1 ratio. Throwing all these numbers around risks reducing “Digger” to something other than what it is, turning it into an object of fetishism for film nerds rather than a living, breathing work of art with humanity, ideas, and style. The fact is, however, that seeing “Digger” in VistaVision isn’t about burnishing your elitist credentials — it’s about removing every barrier between you and Iñárritu’s intentions, as the technology brings you closer to the film’s emotional content, not farther away. In the end, “Digger” is as much a film about faces as Bergman’s or John Cassavetes’ are, and repeat viewings peel the onion of the performances to reveal much more than the broad, Strangelove-esque caricatures that the movie seems to be trafficking in on first viewing. “Digger” demands to be seen not only multiple times, but the right way. Not everyone can see it as Iñárritu intended, but if you have access to one of those five VistaVision theaters, there’s really no other choice.