The Guardian reports that Warner Bros has released the first full trailer for Digger, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new comedy-drama starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron trying to avert a global ecological catastrophe. The trailer highlights a major physical transformation for Cruise, with prosthetics, a pot belly and a southern accent making it one of his least recognisable roles in years. The film matters because it pairs one of Hollywood’s biggest stars with an Oscar-winning director on an original project centred on climate disaster, power and satire.

Cruise said at a Los Angeles launch event that the film challenged him in a way no previous project had, while Iñárritu described the idea as a decade-long obsession that began after The Revenant in 2015. According to the film’s premise, Rockwell may have caused the ecological crisis himself and then races to present himself as humanity’s saviour before events spiral into nuclear war. The supporting cast includes John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and Sophie Wilde, and the film is due for worldwide release in early October. Cruise also said he had admired Iñárritu’s work since Amores Perros in 2000, and the director noted that Digger was shot in VistaVision, a high-definition analogue format first introduced in the 1950s.