Jason Momoa traded the trident for a tractor, and somehow it's working.
His new film "Digger," now streaming on Apple TV+, has climbed into the platform's top five in the U.S. this week, and the internet cannot stop arguing about it.
It's a slow, sunbaked story about a disgraced oil engineer who inherits his late father's failing sod farm in eastern Montana.
And yet, people are watching it in droves.
The movie opens with Momoa's character, Riggs Calloway, driving a rusted pickup through wheat fields while a voiceover explains soil pH.
For twenty full minutes, almost nothing happens except dirt talk.
Then a corporate land developer shows up with a check, and the whole thing quietly turns into a thriller without ever raising its voice.
Half of TikTok is calling it "the most boring movie of the decade," while the other half is posting edits of one specific scene — Momoa kneeling in a field at dusk, hands covered in mud, saying nothing for ninety seconds.
That clip has racked up more than 40 million views.
No dialogue, no music, just a man and some topsoil.
Director Rian Halloran told Variety she shot the film on actual working farms with a crew of eleven people. "We couldn't afford extras, so we used real farmers," she said. "They were better anyway." That scrappy production story has become part of the film's appeal, especially among viewers tired of green-screen blockbusters.
The casting is the other conversation starter.
Momoa reportedly took a pay cut to get the movie made, and he's been unusually candid about why.
In a GQ interview, he said he wanted to play someone "who fixes things with his hands and still loses." Critics have noted that this is the most restrained work of his career, which is both a compliment and a warning depending on who you ask.
Then there's the ending, which we won't spoil.
What we will say is that it has generated roughly four thousand Reddit threads in six days, most of them asking the same question: was that a happy ending or not?
Halloran has refused to clarify, telling one interviewer, "If I explain it, I've failed." Apple reportedly paid around $18 million for the film after a bidding war at Sundance, a number that felt absurd at the time and now looks like a bargain.
The movie cost less than $9 million to produce.
Streaming data suggests it's pulling in viewers well outside the arthouse crowd — plenty of them are people who clicked expecting a Jason Momoa action movie and stayed anyway.
That mismatch might be the whole magic trick.
Nobody expected the guy from "Aquaman" to make a quiet movie about irrigation, and nobody expected to care about irrigation.
But here we are, three weeks later, still arguing about a sod farm.
Our take: "Digger" isn't for everyone, and it isn't trying to be.
It's a slow, stubborn little movie that trusts its audience more than most studio releases dare to.
Final Thoughts
In a streaming landscape stuffed with loud, forgettable content, that stubbornness is exactly why it's trending.