Digger, Alejandro Iñárritu’s $125 million satire, opened October 2 with Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon whose Arctic drilling sets off a planetary catastrophe. In UnHerd, the film historian David Thomson, author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls it a flawed masterpiece and does not flinch from the flaws. The fable is “striking yet shallow.” Supporting characters are “introduced but not adequately explored.” Cruise, he writes, “is so terrified of being boring he cannot stoop to stillness or quiet.”

And yet. Thomson sees Cruise’s paunchy, manic Digger as a portrait of an age in which “the idiotic has become axiomatic,” a domineering, foolish authority convinced that power justifies whatever it wants. Beneath the performance is a look he finds more frightening than any horror film: “A look of gray ice pervades the movie; primary colors have been eliminated.” “There is no human touch any longer.”

A film about the end of the world, in other words, that looks the way the end of the world would look.

Most American critics saw a different movie. At RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels writes that “Digger chokes on its own ambitions, and very few of the picture’s participants emerge still breathing.” The film, he argues, never commits to its own high concept, and its dialogue preaches: “Every line explicitly explains the vapid evil espoused by craven industrialists against our fragile environment.”

William Bibbiani of TheWrap goes after the politics. A satire of billionaires that never threatens one is just flattery for the audience: “We are powerless to stop them, but we do get to point and giggle.” Of Cruise: he “hasn’t done this much caps-locked ‘ACTING’ in many years.”

On this reading, Digger is the thing it mocks: an expensive spectacle of the apocalypse that lets everyone go home feeling superior to it.