Three months after Elon Musk said Grok would release a full-length, “historically accurate” movie version of “The Odyssey,” the company has put out its first installment: seven minutes of AI-generated footage. Grok is calling it “Episode 1 of our Odyssey series.”
The project was created in collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. Musk had previously lashed out at Christopher Nolan’s version of the epic, objecting to the director’s casting of nonwhite and transgender actors. Nolan, who has described himself as “a techno-skeptic,” has said that before AI he had never seen a technology “so completely rejected by the public.” Musk, by contrast, has promoted data centers in space and posted a steady stream of AI-generated content.
The contrast with Nolan’s film is hard to miss. His “Odyssey” was released in July and relied heavily on practical filmmaking. It was shot across six countries with a cast and crew of thousands. Although it used visual effects, its core was physical production, and it has become a box office success, selling out Imax screenings for months. It is also considered a likely front-runner at the next Academy Awards.
The Grok clip is a different proposition. Reviewing it, one critic said the footage was not as “spectacularly ugly” as expected and was more impressive than other AI videos Musk has recently posted. Some shots, the critic wrote, come close to resembling real actors sailing across a real sea.
The critic also pointed to several departures from the source material. No one in the clip speaks ancient Greek. All the characters are played with a skin tone that the reviewer described as “Musk-approved.” The narrator speaks with a British accent that the reviewer said will sound familiar to anyone who has played a fantasy video game or watched a generic Hollywood epic from the past 25 years. The critic said they could not assess the clip’s historical accuracy, which Grok has promised.
The biggest complaint was about the storytelling. The backstory, delivered in voiceover, runs long before giving way to a series of bearded characters shouting stilted lines. Nolan’s dialogue has drawn its own criticism, including the line “Our age of bronze is collapsing!” The critic said the Grok version makes even that sound like Shakespeare.
Individual shots might approximate reality, the reviewer wrote, but the clip as a whole feels airless. It offers no momentum and no reason to care about any character. The critic said they had no trouble sitting through nearly three hours of Nolan’s film but found themselves checking the clock before the Grok clip reached its halfway point. “If it was a video game cutscene, I would have hit the ‘skip’ button,” the reviewer wrote.
Grok has not said when the next episodes will arrive. The first seven minutes offer a limited test of whether AI-generated video can carry a story of this scale, and the early response suggests the technology still has a long way to go before it can compete on craft with the films it is meant to rival.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
News Factory APP - agentic news to boost your SEO & AEO.