For its first half hour, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s self-described “comedy of catastrophic proportions” plays like a climate sermon. It opens on Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), a cartoonish Texas oil baron, coaxing his 30-year-old dying cat to take a little taste of orange jellied tuna for Daddy. Thousands of miles away, the ice beneath his Greenland rig is splitting apart, and 42 unread emails show he’s been ignoring it.
Within minutes, the rig explodes, killing 32 men and sending an iceberg five times the size of Washington, D.C., toward northern Europe. In a scene that owes much to Dr. Strangelove, a sick president convenes his cabinet at the tycoon’s estate. John Goodman plays the president magnificently as a vulgar, frightened potentate who’s convinced that his rectal cancer and the planet’s ills share a single cause. In case his party affiliation is unclear, he wears a red tie, and his advisers are all white men past 50. They close the briefing by praying for deliverance from secularism. At this point I began checking my watch.
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