Elon Musk continues to rage over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which defied online hysteria from the right and broke box office records in its first days in theaters. The world’s only trillionaire — who claims to love the Homeric epics — is so incensed that he is now promising to create an entirely AI-generated, “historically accurate,” adaptation of The Odyssey.
“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Musk wrote Tuesday night on his social media platform, X. He’s so proud of the idea that, as of Wednesday afternoon, the post is pinned to the top of his page.
In a reply to another user’s post, Musk also indicated that he is “down” to give Mel Gibson — a bonafide Greek, apparently — $100 million to film an adaptation of The Odyssey that was “painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.”
For context, the film released by Nolan had a production budget of $250 million.
Musk shared a three-minute sample clip of what his Grok AI Odyssey might look like, one produced by another user on X. The teaser depicts a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso. If whatever product Musk plans to produce is supposed to be “true to the art” of Homer, it’s not looking very promising.
As is typically the case with AI slop, it’s a hodgepodge of stereotypes and stilted dialogue. The armor worn by Odyssesus looks about as realistic as a “Roman Soldier” halloween costume. The “sirens” are statuesque women draped in canary yellow maxi dresses that scream budget bridesmaid. Odysseus is literally wearing foam earplugs to block out their song. The shadow of Hermes is depicted with giant, dovelike wings in the style of a biblical angel. Calypso is a strawberry blond, green-eyed dime with lip filler and a case of Instagram face. The characters deliver lines like emoting Sims.
Months ago, when news broke that Nolan had cast Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o and Oscar nominee Elliot Page to play minor parts in his Odyssey, Musk raged that the acclaimed film director was “pissing on Homer’s grave.” It’s unlikely that the blind poet — who may or may not have even existed — was a committed white nationalist who shared Musk and his ilk’s obsession with European beauty standards developed three millennia after his time.
But what could be more disrespectful to the Homeric works Musk claims to love than stripping them of humanism that has made them immortal. Musk’s ideal Odyssey is one rendered entirely in the hallucination of a computer that, like him, is unable to comprehend the very story it is telling, without the intimacy of human art and labor. Pixels on a screen mimicking an algorithmically generated average of the work of better creatives and scholars is a product, to be sure — but as far as art is concerned, it’s worth less than the water a data center polluted to make it.
