A few moments into Digger, Tom Cruise, playing the titular Digger Rockwell, recounts a story from his youthful days in Texas. He says he hit a home run as a kid, sending the ball twenty feet over the fence and sealing the win for his little league team. After the game, he expected his stern grandfather to congratulate him on the feat of power. Instead, he was disappointed. He told Digger that any dummy with enough muscle can get lucky every once in a while to hit a home run. In his view, the ultimate showcase of baseball skill is hitting a triple, as that takes speed, finesse, and gumption. There's a reason it's the least common type of hit in baseball.

Perhaps director Alejandro G. Iñárritu could have taken that advice for his newest film, his first in English in over a decade. Or maybe one of his four credited co-writers (Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone) snuck the story in as a way to temper Iñárritu's eyes as they quickly became bigger than his stomach. But Iñárritu is not a filmmaker who has ever done anything lightly, only stepping up to the play when a grand slam is in play. Babel featured multiple globe-trotting storylines, her served as director/writer/producer/editor/composer and the central basis for the story in Bardo; performed one-take trickery in Birdman; and braved the frigid elements for The Revenant. He earned back-to-back directing Oscars for the latter two works, proving that his sights are often on target. Digger joins those works in ambition, but not outcome.

Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (also an Academy Award winner for Birdman and The Revenant) in widescreen VistaVision, Digger looks like a million bucks. The reported budget is $125 million, probably the same amount Mr. Rockwell put into his palatial compound. The film opens in an unknown serene location, a mysterious place where jungles, marshes, fields, and oak trees co-exist. Inside are decorations one would expect from a Texas-born oil tycoon: lots of dead animal furs, guns adorned above the fireplace, and massive paintings illustrating the kill-or-be-killed law of nature.

But all this material beauty is just window dressing for a deeply ugly movie, made by those with either a deep contempt or twisted sense of compassion for humanity. Rising out of Digger's lake are air bubbles, the same ones coming out of the ice caps he's drilling up in Greenland. The more he drills, the more air that gets released, and the more the caps melt. One of the caps, about the size of a small US state, reaches a critical melting point, breaks away, and is hurled toward northern Europe by Arctic Ocean currents. Mother Nature has finally fought back, with millions of lives being lost and/or displaced within a matter of days.

Hustling and bustling through the dozens of rooms at Digger's compound are a host of wacky characters. There's Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger's head of environmental science who tries to supply facts and reasoning in these dire times; Emma Rockwell (Sandra Hüller), Digger's angered half-sister; President Compson (John Goodman), who should be questioned as to how he got elected in a less fraught time period; and the Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), timidly appeasing every whim of the dictator-in-chief. Each brings strong personalities, bristling against the words "if," "possible," and "could" that Ganesh uses in his science-focused presentation on the impending catastrophe. These people only deal in absolutes, with facts being malleable pieces used to build a narrative.

Despite all of this being packed within the first twenty minutes, so many questions are raised. Where are we? What year is it? It seems pretty modern, but some of the tech is a little different than we're used to. Why does the president leave the White House and come to Digger? How does he get there so fast? Why is everything else moving so fast? Why is everyone yelling their lines and being the most obnoxious versions of themselves? Why am I not laughing at any of the jokes?

Eventually, a sudden story shift answers most of these questions. I know what it is, and you don't. And I can't and won't tell you about it here. Sounds a bit cheeky, right? That's the tone Iñárritu strikes here, replacing his prior pretension with an obscene amount of smugness. Combined with Cosmo Sheldrake's frantic score, the ear-splitting IMAX soundscape, and dialogue scenes packed with aggressive shouting, this becomes an extremely unpleasant viewing experience. Should I praise a movie for giving me a headache and putting me in a generally sour mood afterwards?

Simultaneously, the structure and ideas percolating here are deeply fascinating. The only difference between a tragedy and a comedy is time, and we've reached the point where we can only laugh at our own ineptitude. Everything is literally crumbling right before our eyes, and our only worry is not being the one holding the hot potato when it all comes crashing down, as if that matters. There should be more movies like this, armed with pokes and prods as it sends the audience home questioning what they just witnessed.

There should also be more roles like this for Tom Cruise. As he did for Michael Keaton in Birdman, Iñárritu brings Cruise out of his self-controlled action movie shell and back to a similar lane as his turn as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. To play someone his own age, the sixty-four-year-old actor dons thinning grey hair, wrinkly skin, and a bulging gut. Iñárritu and Lubezki certainly don't flatter him by shooting primarily from a low angle, the light bouncing off his bald, spotted forehead. They give him plenty of monologues, mostly done in a single take as the actor's superhuman energy and athleticism grab our attention.

Digger is a film I want to learn everything about. I want to read every review, interview, and essay. I want a Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse documentary made about it, capturing everything from inception to presentation. It'll be in my head for the rest of my life, intermittently reappearing to make me ponder its ideas. But I never want to rewatch it, as that sounds like a miserable use of my time. It's quite the conundrum, one that can only be achieved by a film whose swing perpetually flirts with being fair or foul.

Warner Bros. Pictures will release Digger in theaters nationwide on October 02nd.