There is a particular disappointment reserved for films that arrive trailing prestige, and this is one of them. Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director who has already collected two Best Director Oscars, in Los Angeles, for "Birdman" and "The Revenant", returns with a satire that is meant to skewer American power and appetite, yet spends most of its running time admiring its own reflection instead. At its centre is Tom Cruise, transformed almost unrecognisably into "Digger" Rockwell, a paunchy, balding Texan oil baron first seen fussing over his incontinent cat before turning his attention to a crisis at his Arctic drilling site. His prized possession, a battered shovel once used by his grandfather in the same Texas oil fields a century earlier, becomes a prop he waves whenever he wants to make a point.

It is a performance built from prosthetics and drawl, and while it has flashes of energy, it rarely convinces. The plot turns on a warning delivered by Ganesh, the company's anxious chief scientist, played by Riz Ahmed, who reveals that reckless drilling has broken off an ice floe several times the size of Manhattan, now drifting toward Norway with the force of an incoming attack. What follows, a White House crisis meeting with an ailing president played by John Goodman, should crackle with tension; instead, it drags, wasting fine actors, including Sandra Hüller, in underwritten roles. What lingers afterward, oddly, is not the satire but the imagery: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner conjure a genuinely eerie, bulging vision of a frozen world in collapse.

The spectacle survives.