Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is an oil man. The tycoon finds himself in the midst of a busy morning, trying to balance home vet visits for his aging cat while Sandy Clarkson (Danny Kirrane) over video tries to explain the troubling situation at one of Rockwell’s rigs up in Greenland. A crack in the ice has grown, setting loose a large portion of the ice shelf, Judy, well on its way to impact with the Nordic Coast, threatening to displace millions of people across all of Europe.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs Digger, a black, satirical comedy – or perhaps a farce – which he co-wrote with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman. Released by Warner Brothers outside of the summer festival circuit, they placed one of the biggest and most secretive films of the year on 3,300 domestic screens after not addressing the online rumors that the film is a musical – it’s not – and relying on the polarized reaction from London previews the week before. Running 129 minutes, it allows Iñárritu the freedom to indulge in many of the tropes and themes which he enjoys needling at while also making his frustrations at the state of the world quite known.

The film was a buzzy title which found Iñárritu reuniting with Dinelaris and Giacobone, his Oscar-winning screenwriting team from Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), and casting director Francine Maisler, who led the cast of Birdman to three acting nominations and followed up that with leading Leonardo DiCaprio to his first Oscar win in The Revenant (2015). Here, Digger boasts another transformative role for the leading man, finding Cruise nearly unrecognizable under the hair and makeup designed by Alessandro Bertolazzi and prosthetics designed by Olivia Jerrard. It is only a handful of times when cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki – another Iñárritu frequent collaborator – catches Cruise in profile that a knowing audience may see a flash of Ethan Hunt. There are many times when Cruise is looking at the camera head-on, and surprisingly his eyes are not what breaks the illusion, and even when we do see recognizable features, there is so much else going on in every single frame of this film that we never have a chance to be anything but under the narrative waves, treading frantically to keep our heads above water.

Iñárritu sets the stage in a frenzy as a globe-changing, ecological and commercial tragedy is underway. This opening act quickly becomes a revolving door of characters just as outsized as Digger: Maggie, a three-paws-in-the-grave, thirty-year-old cat; Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s Beaker-esque chief environmental safety expert; Emma Rockwell (Sandra Hüller), Digger’s business-minded half-sister weeks away from taking her green energy company public; and U.S. President Compson (John Goodman), a blubbering blowhard whose incompetence seems almost quaint compared to reality. This all builds to a situation room sketch – notably set not in the White House, but rather in one of the conference rooms of Digger’s own estate showing who truly holds the power here – something akin to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) on a sugar rush pushing performances, shots, specifically the Dutch angles so extreme the camera is practically on its side, and the overall mise-en-scène to the absolute extreme; Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson served as production designers with Anna Pinnock designing sets, Jacqueline West on costumes, and a delightful jack-in-the-box score by Cosmo Sheldrake. As it insists on its seemingly one-note thesis that billionaire politicians do not care for the people they are charged with protecting, the film makes a wild reveal at about the twenty-five minute mark. Digger and President Compson are standing in the decrepit naturalist escape of his mother’s, looking out at the estate grounds that seem even more artificial than even the rest of the estate interiors, as if the world is simply their playground. As they look out, a tree falls down, an omen of the collapsing environment, and from the hillside a giant man emerges; Lubezki pulls back the camera, revealing the as-of-yet unseen wings of the stage, and the director, Hannah (Sophie Wilde), enters the frame as Digger and the President give a sigh of relief in this break from the final tech rehearsal of “Fossil Fools” before the preview audiences arrive later that evening.

While the timbre of the film had gotten into an irritating pitch before this reveal, the shift comes off as rather troubling at first, but for audiences that do not totally turn their back on the film after this shakeup, they will find that they are still in good hands with Iñárritu and Cruise. Backstage, we find an actor in crisis, both professionally, as he begins to butt up against his director, but personally, too, his daughter’s plane has gone missing in a storm. It is a layered performance, and something of a trope within Cruise’s own career that is always fascinating to watch: an actor, Cruise, playing an actor playing a character, not unlike when, as Ethan Hunt, he has to don a disguise to pull off a heist or sneak past a guard point. One could say that he’s “a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude” (Tropic Thunder, 2008). The difference here, though, is that the “mask” is fully in the performance because Curtis Markson is Digger and not donning a latex mask to transform his facial features. We see him shed the character of Digger and race to put the affectations back on when places are called, and it is in this at once stripped-down but also highly stylized juggling act that we realize Cruise is more than just a body to be flung from an airplane or tossed to the bottom of the ocean, but one of our most energetic and enigmatic performers currently in the business.

Returning to the stage, hovering around the one-hour mark, Cruise erupts in a showstopping tirade in front of a European tribunal which convened to discuss the fallout of Judy’s collision with the continent. Digger uses this platform as well as any snake oil salesman with politicians in his back pocket would, and he convinces us that we are our own enemies in our greed and desire for convenience. This could be a well-made argument if done in good faith, and to be fair to Iñárritu and his writing team, they do make some interesting points, but it is where the film is at its most preachy and can really rub the audience the wrong way, especially audiences that are already well aligned with the film’s world view. He is preaching to an audience that is living in a reality where they are met with a government that hinders the proliferation and exploration of renewable energy, where cancerous capitalism has led to empty storefronts forcing us to shop online for even the most mundane items, and if we want to move away from an oil-powered car, we are forced to spend our stagnant wages at a company led by Elon Musk. While Digger, the character, is not one to bring these very valid points up because he directly profits from these systems, by handwaving them away in his showmanship, Digger, the film, consequently, does not adequately explore the illusion of choice we as consumers are faced with every day. Iñárritu is using this script as an outlet for his anger at the system, but like so many of these it-it-time-to-wake-up and eat-the-rich scripts, its anger remains so surface level that they seldom say anything new or of nuance. Thankfully, here, the production design and the performances are pushed to a cinematic extreme so we remain engaged even if it does create a perverse sense of bread and circuses.

As biting and damning of a send-up of the intersection between modern American politics and capitalism as Digger is, even Iñárritu could not have fathomed the complete social ineptitude of Vice President JD Vance when he penned the laughably ineffective Vice President Eddie (Michael Stuhlbarg), nor could he have foreseen the absolute stupidity that led to the so-called Gulf of America. On one hand, there is a hopeful reading to that map on the wall in one of the final scenes, which refers to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico as indicative of a total rejection of and resetting from the harmful buffoonery of Trump 2.0, but after spending two hours with political sycophants and corporate leeches still in their seats of power, it posits that there truly will not be meaningful change and that we are well on our way to social catastrophe. It is grafting the troubling track which our planet and environment are on, especially after coming off of the hottest summer on record, onto society as a whole, revealing it to be in a state of rot. Notably, unlike many dystopias, the world of Digger – or at least the world shown to us through “Fossil Fools” – is one where even the elite are pushed into isolated squalor, yet Digger is still able to live peacefully enough, insulated from the rage of the millions of people his greed has upset and displaced. While the converted oil rig turned abode is a far cry from Xanadu, where the – admittedly overlong – final act plays out, it is not quite the karmic tragedy of a defeated man in a crumbling castle that the film seems to think it is.

After the curtain closes, Iñárritu’s worldview becomes much more complicated in its vagueness. There are many smart little reveals that slowly catch us up to speed, never pinpointing an exact year in the future yet still revealing that this is not a born-from-nothing satire but rather the evolution of a direct grassroots weaponization of art against the real-life Digger and the impact that the real-life Judy ice shelf collision had in reshaping the world. That being said, behind the scenes and below the stage, it becomes very unclear what kind of class system has formed from the eroded and washed-away world that we know. The audience leaves the theatre by placing on their singularly branded Lungz masks to filter the rancid air outside, so there is clearly still the corporate haves and the plebian have-nots, and somewhere caught in the middle, an even more militarized police force still patrols what is left of the streets. We know that Curtis’ daughter has been located and that she landed safely after her flight got rerouted and delayed from a category 6 hurricane off of Jamaica all thanks to the detective work of Kenny (Jesse Plemons), owner of a cyber detective agency ending the narrative with the same sense of highly questionable altruism that Ring Cameras’ (owned by Amazon) Super Bowl LX commerical touting its new Flock partnership had; the contract was dissolved shortly after immeidate public backlash, and only weeks before stories broke about police using the cameras to stalk partners, family members, and others instead of using the benevolent technology to bring lost puppies home safely as the ad suggested. With this in mind, it is strange that the graffiti we see as the end credits begin to scroll, which one can assume is from the side of the resistance, reads that “compliance is freedom,” but after seeing how politics have allowed for the absolute basardization of law enforcement through the egregious actions not only of ICE, but even the continued immunity enjoyed by the silent blue wall, this message is a strange one that points to a very conflicted messenger, even though it is unlikely that Iñárritu knowingly minces his words. As we leave our own screenings, thankfully, we do not need masks that almost certainly would not be approved and provided by insurance companies as care, forcing us to funnel more of our wages to another company that parades around as providing a service but is led by an abhorrent beast. The weight of the world and the weight of the consequences of our lived-in reality are nevertheless on our shoulders, though, and in that way, with all of its bold and brash styling and choices, Iñárritu’s film is an undeniable success.