Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger is a $180 million joke, made all the more funny by holding the honor of having one of the worst opening weekends for a major, wide-release, A-list led film. And since the film reveals itself to be essentially a two-hour-long gag, it could really only lead to its status as an unprecedented, historically groundbreaking flop. This self-fulfilling, self-defeating setup to a joke could only end in its own failure, in that it undermines itself in the eyes of its audience. Digger is an exhaustive film that builds to a final punchline that deflates the previous two hours of irritating comedy, constantly teetering over both sides of grating and gratifying while never wholly succumbing to the gravity of one or the other. That is to say, it is a joke that in its setup is not even particularly funny. Of course, this only makes it all the funnier when the magician, after stringing you along, promising something fantastic, finally goes to pull the rabbit out of the hat only to flip you the bird instead. All that for this? It is a running joke that leads you to believe it is running out of steam the entire way, when really it was only toying with you. Yes, of course! You see, the joke was always on you, dear viewer. And Iñárritu never backs down from the challenge he set out for himself, the antagonistic disregard toward his audience, for the punchline takes place in the final shot of the film, a shot that quickly becomes overshadowed by the scrolling of the film’s credits and the raising of the theater’s house lights. And so, the joke is on the joke itself: the punchline doesn’t even get a moment to breathe before most of the thoroughly irritated or exhausted audience members are already out of their seats. A perfect execution.

None of it meant anything. When the curtain is pulled back about a third of the way through the film to reveal that the events witnessed heretofore and thereafter are actually the final dress rehearsals for the opening night of the 25th anniversary revival of a stage play based on historical events that mirror and prefigure the ecological collapse inevitable and unavoidable within the reality of we the audience—it is through this rug pull therefore that the film devilishly bides its time for the final reveal, the real joke of the matter. The play, ending with the drowning of its protagonist, oil magnate Digger Rockwell, the man largely responsible for the environmental disaster at the heart of Fossil Fools, ends with rapturous, cathartic applause, the actors coming back up through the stage for the curtain call. In the midst of the standing ovation, the velvet barrier (the grandeur of its usually deep red drained of life into a dull taupe) sinks, separating the actors on their darkened stage and the audience under the house lights. An announcement is made—“Level 4”—to inform the patrons of the severity of the hazardous environmental conditions that await them outside, encouraging them to put on their branded face mask respirators. The sky outside is overcast and the streets are flooded. The patrons walk out onto the crowded sidewalks and scavengers wade in the water to salvage resources left behind in sunken cars. Soldiers patrol the streets and drones patrol the skies. The imagery of a drowned city under technocratic rule also conjures that which it does not include, that which has likely already occurred as a result of Rockwell’s ecological crisis: border skirmishes, the detention of climate refuges, civil wars, extremist political violence in reaction to increased immigration, plus clean water shortages, all of which will have already caused hundreds of millions of deaths. Art, if it can even still be called that, is only a distraction from such, a pastime of wasted money and time; and through it, we do not have the power to change the world. It was all for nothing—a big joke.

So then, how did this film even get made in the first place? How did Iñárritu even get this much money at his disposal? And for this movie? Where is all of this money onscreen? Or does it mostly comprise the bloated paychecks of its inflated stars? This will not be the last time Hollywood will waste exorbinant amounts of money, even if Digger is the hilarious capstone of a Warner Bros. before its merger with Paramount Skydance. The joke of its own industrial failure, the joke about its own artistic failure is only heightened by the record-breaking summer blockbusters earlier this year with Universal’s The Odyssey and Disney’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. No matter how much they earn, it all goes to show that art and cinema (cinema as art) is all a racket. Iñárritu recognizes he cannot stop what is already in motion, none of the names credited after his own can change anything either, and the idiots who watched him tell them that most certainly cannot do a thing about it. Perhaps following in the same theatrical vein as Digger it would be more fitting to defer here to the greatest English playwright: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Regardless of its “artistic” “intentions” or “return” on “investment,” I cannot fathom how it is not evil and descipable to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie even if it were to go on to make quadruple its budget, but god is it funny.

Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.