I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with a GeForce GTX 750 graphics card. The game launches fine, I select to play a single-player campaign, a little movie with fluffy bunnies plays, I press the Play button, and the game crashes. Searching around, I found that some people had success using -force-opengl, but the game slowed to an unplayable crawl, so that's not a solution for me. Anybody else overcome this?

I wish I could help, but I've run into the same issue myself. I've tried both the Steam and GOG versions of this game and it invariably crashes to desktop during the opening cinematic for the single-player campaign. I have been able to play skirmish mode, though. (Of course I have no idea what I'm doing in skirmish mode because I haven't been able to play the tutorial levels in the campaign.) I take some consolation from the fact that this was a free game and that the Windows version of the game seems equally troubled.

Addendum:

I've discovered that if you re-launch the game after the crash to desktop, you'll get the option to "Continue" from the main menu. Selecting Continue skips the animated cutscene and takes you directly in to the tutorial mission.

Yeah, crashing here as well.
I tried skipping the movie yesterday, which made it crash immediately, but today that worked, so I was able to play through the tutorial. Of course, after the tutorial is another movie ....

I have that installed, doesn't change anything.

No - I totally missed that bit of fine print. I installed the package and now it works. Thanks!

To others for whom this doesn't fix the problem: Prior to installing the missing package, I used the argument "-force-glcore33" with success. I had previously tried "-force-glcore45," which matched the version number supported by my graphics driver, but that gave me the crash. Now that I have the required library installed, it runs fine without a command-line argument.

That fixes it for me, intro runs without a problem when using -force-glcore33. Thanks a lot!
Edit: Actually, no it doesn't. I was watching the second movie by accident, which ran through without crashing. The first one still kills the game, no matter what.