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Cruise plays two roles

school-shooter Ivy Wolk

Didn't Jack Nicholson do much the same thing in Mars Attacks!(?)

Synecdoche, New York

Around a half hour in [we see the stuff from the trailer first - Digger on Zoom calls, his old cat, on and on], a tree falls in the background of the scene and we notice that it’s a miniature and part of a stage set. A play called “Fossil Fools” is going through final rehearsals, with Cruise in the lead role as the real life oil tycoon whose ignorance set off a chain of events that have all but destroyed society as we know it. This play is having its 25th anniversary, despite it being crude and broad and vulgar, because people use it as an outlet for their frustrations about the state of the world and still love it. We later find out that Plemons’ character is the one who financed all of this, and he is Digger’s nephew IRL, using his inherited wealth to stage the production, and his surveillance company to help Cruise locate his missing daughter out of the goodness of his heart or whatever we’re meant to understand it as. Cruise’s adult daughter is missing because her plane got caught in a suddenly appearing Category 6 hurricane that sent her off course en route to seeing her dad in the play. No idea why this environmental post-apocalypse still has civilian air travel, but I digress. Despite the fourth wall having been broken and occasional check-ins with these backstage happenings, the rest of the film is still largely more scenes from the play rehearsal, concluding with the final scene being for an audience who applaud lustily at Cruise’s crescendo. There’s then a warning that plays indicating that the doors of the theater are about to open into the outside world and that high tech masks (called ‘LUNGZ’) are meant to be worn before the air outside is breathed in. Then the movie ends on an image of a robot checking somebody’s immigration papers or whatever as people trudge along a Fallout-esque landscape. If this doesn’t sound great, it’s because it isn’t.