The new climate disaster movie by director Alejandro Iñárritu’s (Birdman, The Revenant) starts with Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a larger-than-life oil tycoon who causes an ecological catastrophe and gets tasked with damage control.

The ruling class here is portrayed as greedy warmongering buffoons straight out of a Trump parody, inviting the viewer’s condescension. Then about half an hour in, the camera pulls back to reveal we’re watching a rehearsal for a play called “Fossil Fools”, and the real disaster happened years ago. Is it still a tragedy, or is it farce?

The rest is a film about the role of art under capitalism. It takes well-deserved shots at smug liberals who futilely rely on satire, and at bourgeois politicians who decry oil while depending on it.

Eventually we learn the production is bankrolled by a Rockwell heir, a “benevolent” tech mogul (Jesse Plemons) who sells it as catharsis: a way to heal collective trauma, or at least cope with the absurdity. After the curtain falls, we see the audience put on gas masks and walk out into a poisoned dystopian hellscape. This is the barbarism we’re headed toward with no alternate vision offered.

And this is where the movie traps itself, despite being provocative, often genuinely funny, and accurate about U.S. imperialism destroying the planet. In offering nothing beyond moral condemnation and platitudes like “cinema brings people together”, Digger fails by its own critique.

Its greatest act of poetic justice is a historic box office bomb, with Warner Bros. projected to lose $250 million. Whether sold as a big-star dark comedy or a polarizing eco-satire, a movie this cynical and self-aware was never going to work for Hollywood. Maybe it’s enough with the liberal nihilism.