T hink back. Do you remember when Elon Musk, in a weird online tantrum, and without having seen the film, condemned the supposed wokery in Christopher Nolan’s, The Odyssey, for getting Elliot Page to play Sinon and Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy? As the plaudits and the box-office receipts for Nolan’s Odyssey piled stratospherically up, Musk showed that being a good loser is not among his qualities. He petulantly exclaimed that he could do his own better and more authentic Odyssey on Grok AI. And now he has released the first online seven-minute “episode” to a world that has long since forgotten about this claim and didn’t care in the first place.
In Musk’s version, as the tale begins Odysseus is – off screen – pretending to be mad to avoid fighting in the Trojan war. Grim-faced Palamedes and Agamemnon are shown testing this ruse by taking his baby boy Telemachus and placing him in the harm’s way of a plough in a field; Odysseus instantly rushes to save his child, showing that he isn’t mad, and agrees to fight. We see him join the armada, with Penelope and Telemachus (soon to grow to a little boy) left behind. This, effectively, is a prologue sequence that is not in Nolan. The expeditionary force arrives at Troy, and an intertitle tells us we have cut to a 10-years-later flashforward; the siege is about to escalate into the fake-horse attack.
As ever, the AI footage is ponderous and inert, demonstrating its familiar uncanny-valley stock-footage quality with classical-age Call of Duty graphics. Every single dramatic moment – Odysseus’s cod-insanity and his agreeing to fight, taking leave of his family, the hardship and adventure of the sea journey and the climactic decision – is all as motiveless and meaningless as the movement of shapes on a laptop screensaver. The ships are lined up on the sea like a row of high-def space invaders. Perhaps the worst thing about it is the deadly audio and digital-robot voice work. Every character speaks with that even, over-emphatic, declamatory tone.
Who cares? Certainly not Musk. He has no passion to tell us this story, only to win an argument that he long since lost. Perhaps he will now do his Grok AI version of Digger, in which Tom Cruise’s oil baron in fact saves the universe by drilling for more and yet more oil. Or maybe he will release his own Grok AI version of You Can See Everything in which glassy-eyed Elizabeth Holmes will prove her little blood-diagnosis box actually does work before she zooms off with Elon in his flying car.
Of course, as we are always being told, AI is continuously improving. With succeeding episodes, this boring and pointless series may look better. But if Elon’s AI-Odyssey is of any value at all, it is to underscore the basic truth: nobody believes AI has any artistic merit, only financial merit. In terms of quality, it is a pitiful fraction of the real thing, but a zillionth of a zillionth of a zillionth of the cost. It is time for Elon to make his own inglorious retreat from this phoney AI Dull-yssey.
