Warning: this article contains major spoilers for Digger.

In director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger, the eponymous Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) puts on his Stetson first thing in the morning. It’s an embodiment of his credo: “Rise early, work hard, strike oil.” He is rarely without it as he rides roughshod through the extinction-level environmental catastrophe his drilling company has caused.

As other critics have noted, Rockwell’s hat is borrowed from Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), a character in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. In that film’s famous closing sequence, Kong wears his Stetson as he rides a nuclear bomb like a bucking bronco. And there are similarities beyond the hat. Digger also borrows Dr. Strangelove’s war-room satire and its identification of a militaristic male elite as the root cause of the world’s doom. What Iñárritu’s film does with these borrowings, however, is very different.

After Digger’s opening act it is revealed that we are actually watching the technical rehearsal of a play: Fossil Fools. It is here that the connections with Kubrick’s film are strongest. Dr. Strangelove and Fossil Fools are made up mostly of men talking, debating and shouting at each other. Shot in extended takes, claustrophobic chamber scenes capture the insularity of the ruling elite. In doing so, they expose the........

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