Tom Cruise has spent much of his career proving that audiences will follow him just about anywhere. Hang from the side of a mountain? They’re there. Strap yourself to a motorcycle and launch off a cliff? Absolutely. Fly a fighter jet? Blockbuster. But apparently there is one place even Tom Cruise can’t guarantee an audience will follow him: the bizarre, darkly comic world of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger. The new film opened this weekend and promptly cratered at the box office, taking in approximately $8 million domestically and finishing in fifth place. Worldwide, the movie has grossed about $20 million against a production budget reported at roughly $125 million. For Cruise, whose recent films have generally been major theatrical events, it is a particularly rough opening. And yet Digger is hardly a conventional Hollywood failure. In fact, its biggest problem may be that it is anything but conventional. Cruise has teamed with one of contemporary cinema’s most uncompromising filmmakers to make a strange, ambitious and deliberately uncomfortable satire about greed, climate catastrophe, political incompetence and the human tendency to laugh while the world burns. The global superstar plays Digger Rockwell, an obscenely wealthy Texas oil magnate who has accumulated enormous power and influence while drilling wherever he pleases. He is the kind of larger-than-life industrialist who seems to believe that the planet exists primarily as a resource—and that anyone who disagrees simply needs to be talked over. Then his business helps trigger an environmental catastrophe. A massive ice shelf breaks away from Greenland, setting off a chain reaction that threatens to send an enormous wall of ice toward Norway and create a global disaster. When scientist Dr. Ganesh, played by Riz Ahmed, attempts to explain the seriousness of the situation, Digger responds in the only way a man accustomed to getting his way knows how: by taking control. He summons the president, played by John Goodman, and a collection of government officials and advisers for an emergency meeting. But rather than becoming a sober disaster thriller about saving the planet, Digger turns increasingly absurd as its characters attempt to protect themselves, their reputations and their interests. The president is less concerned with solving the crisis than with surviving it politically. Digger is convinced that his money, power and sheer force of personality can somehow overcome the laws of nature. And everyone around them seems to be participating in a giant exercise in denial. That is where Iñárritu comes in. The Mexican filmmaker behind Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Birdman and The Revenant has never been particularly interested in making movies that simply behave themselves. His career has been built on ambitious filmmaking experiments and stories populated by damaged, obsessive or desperate people whose lives collide in increasingly complicated ways. Amores Perros announced him as a major international filmmaker with its fractured, interlocking narrative. 21 Grams and Babel continued his fascination with lives intersecting across seemingly unrelated circumstances. Then came Birdman, his delirious backstage comedy about an actor trying to mount a Broadway play while battling his ego, his past and his own insecurities. The film won Iñárritu the Academy Award for Best Director, and he followed it by winning again for The Revenant, the brutal frontier epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Two consecutive directing Oscars established Iñárritu as one of Hollywood’s most formidable filmmakers. But Digger is arguably an even stranger proposition. The movie has the scale of a major studio production but the personality of an art-house provocation. It was shot entirely in VistaVision, with Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki behind the camera and Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner creating the increasingly elaborate world around Digger. For perhaps the first...