This is not a movie where I would have expected audiences to like it so much more than the critics. I suspect there must have been plenty of self-selection bias. Only people who knew they would like it have seen it, or only people who think that if they understand a movie, that movie must be good.

Its a weird animal. At one point the movie explicitly stops to tell you its supposed to be funny. I’ll get deeper into this in the spoiler section.

So, Digger is a megarich oil tycoon who has very little interest in anything beyond his own wealth and extremely old cat. He gets the news that his drilling has caused a huge iceberg to fall into the sea from Greenland and that iceberg is quickly towards Europe where it will cause huge amounts of damage. So, Digger needs a plan as the useless politicians refuse to take responsibility.

How did anyone think this was going to do well? Since when are comedies that popular? Evan the Almighty, anyone? On top of that, when did absurd, experimental comedies make enough money to justify that kind of a budget? I know this shouldn’t matter, but as I was watching it, the self-indulgence on the screen is off-putting. If this was a movie made on a reasonable budget, I might not have been as negative on it as I am. I would find it humanizing if Cruise did this on the cheap. Instead, we find out that he wanted to cut down on the five hour makeup process, so he made the lives of the artists a living hell. And why would you want the people with prosthetics working on you to hurry? That just feels dangerous and stupid.

Everything in the movie is just expensive. Why? Because the script has a detail (which I’ll get into later) that requires it to be expensive. That’s just gross and – again – stupid. If you were actually going for the message I assume the movie is trying to communicate (although being such a mess, it makes that muddy as well), that isn’t necessary at all.

This movie is about climate change, but also about how we are being manipulated into accepting it. Or maybe it’s just pushing the blame on consumers? Who knows? As I already said, it’s a huge, convoluted mess. Now, that might be a plus for you. If you liked Megalopolis, you might like this as well, and actually this is quite a bit better, but still not good.

Most of the performances feel exaggerated, but there is a reason for that as well. All in all, the script feels like no-one was willing to cut anything. There’s so much what I would characterize as ‘stuff’ in it that would have been easy to cut, but I can’t talk about that without spoiling either so…

Okay, I guess I’ll get into spoilers.

The deceit of the movie is that what we are seeing is a play being rehearsed. We don’t find this out until maybe 40 minutes into it. This is the 25th anniversary of a play called “Fossil Fools” which in the movie is based on real events. At the very end we learn that air is now toxic and everyone now lives in an AI-powered military dictatorship.

This twist leads to unnecessary side-plots like the main character worrying about his missing daughter, having arguments with the director over everything and us finding out that the financier is actually the nephew of Digger (although this isn’t really a surprise if you have seen a movie before). None of this helps except to explain why everything is so big in scope. The financier wanted it that way. He is willing to put up the money to make the play he wants it. I guess there’s something to that, but is that worth it? No. I don’t believe so.

This is also why the performances are what they are. They are not playing for you, they are playing for an imagined theater audience.

Overall, I keep returning to ‘self-indulgent’. There’s so many speeches, so many slow moving scenes, so many expensive backdrops and so forth. Like the shot at the very end where we see what the world looks like now: It’s a composite shot with real and CG elements, and it includes a flooded street which is real water, since there are people in the water. How much was that? And for what? One shot.

And there’s nothing new here. Everyone who pays even a little attention knows all this stuff. We know fossil fuels are destroying our planet, we know methane is going to fuck us over even worse, we know the industry could do better, we know our politicians are complicit, we know we are fed disinformation on this stuff, we know we could ourselves do better, even if that doesn’t actually matter that much.

Am I just supposed to come out of the theater feeling smart for having been knowledgeable? Am I supposed to feel superiority over the people in the movie? What is this thing trying to do? And sure, you can do that well. You can leave people wondering about the message of the movie. Lynch did that. But Iñárritu is not Lynch. You know what he is trying to say, but the way he makes all of this convoluted takes away from it.

All in all, I wouldn’t pay for this. At the same time, this isn’t a second screen experience. You have to pay attention, but doing that isn’t going to pay off. So, what do you do? Just leave it, I guess.