Elon Musk doesn’t have a great track record of following through on his promises. According to MuskOmeter, a site that tracks the pledges Musk has made and whether he’s kept them, he’s at about a 24 percent hit rate.
So it’s almost impressive that one of his sillier promises from this year actually came true.
Late Friday afternoon, Musk shared the first of several planned episodes of an AI-generated version of Homer’s The Odyssey, made with Grok Imagine, the AI video generator from his company xAI. According to a post from the Grok Imagine account, the project is a collaboration between Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. Both specialize in generative AI filmmaking.
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Musk first made the promise in July. As Mashable reported at the time, he posted on X that, before the year ended, Grok Imagine would make a full-length Odyssey movie that would be "historically accurate and true to the art of Homer."
That was the culmination of months of Musk complaining about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. Much of the right-wing backlash to Nolan’s film was framed in terms of historical accuracy. The initial trailer sparked a little doubt about a faithful adaptation, as some took issue with the film’s armor, calling it bland and closer to Roman than Greek.
The bigger outrage came from the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon. In February, Musk declared on X that Nolan had "lost his integrity" over it, as Mashable reported. Musk and others argued that a Black woman couldn’t play a character described as the most beautiful woman in the ancient world.
Leave aside what that says about who gets to count as beautiful. Helen of Troy isn’t a real person. Troy was a real city, but historians still debate whether anything resembling the Trojan War ever happened. In Greek mythology, Helen herself is the daughter of Zeus and was hatched from an egg. "Historical accuracy" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Musk also took issue with Page's casting. In May, Musk reshared posts criticizing the casting, including some that misgendered the trans actor. Because Nolan’s cast list didn’t say who was playing whom, online conspiracy theories claimed Page would play Achilles. Instead, Page played Sinon, a character who originally appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, which is essentially Roman fan fiction of the Trojan War.
With the casting details, Musk and right-leaning influencers predicted Nolan's adaptation would flop — "go woke, go broke." Instead, The Odyssey opened to $124.5 million in July, a huge number for an R-rated, nearly three-hour film. IMAX 70mm screenings sold out weeks in advance, as Mashable previously reported. As of this writing, Nolan's film has grossed over $1.7 billion worldwide.
Nolan, for his part, has been openly skeptical of generative AI. He told AFP earlier this year that the idea of it replacing human creativity is "a nonsense," according to The Guardian.
Is Elon Musk's The Odyssey good?
Musk's Grok-imagined version of Homer's tale is about what you'd expect. The first episode runs a little over seven minutes and covers the Greeks’ arrival at Troy. Every character is white.
Visually, it has all the usual problems of generative AI video: unnaturally perfect teeth; the weightless, almost water-like hair texture; and the skin has an odd, smudgy quality that comes from the model not really understanding lighting or perspective. The backgrounds also suffer from something akin to texture pop-in, where video games load low-resolution textures before the detailed ones, so the screen isn't just black.
As just a film to watch, the writing isn't all that great, and it's hard to keep up with all the characters as they look similar or look way too similar to real people.
On top of that, in the entire seven-minute runtime, Odysseus is the only named character. Unless you've read The Odyssey fairly recently, you'd be confused about who some of the characters are — how is one supposed to know that one of those two men in the photo above is Palamedes? I sure didn't.
As part of the promotion, Wonder Studios posted on X that "Homer didn’t have Grok… we do." True enough. Homer also told the story well enough that people are still adapting it nearly 3,000 years later, without any help from AI.
Although Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is winding down its theater run, the critically acclaimed film is set to release digitally on Nov. 17. To tide you over, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana, got a cultural re-evaluation thanks to the success of Nolan's film. It's human-made and currently holds a 3.5 average rating on Letterboxd.