Elon Musk claims his Grok Imagine AI will complete a full-length Odyssey film by December, doubling down on his feud with Christopher Nolan's casting choices.
Proof that we are living in the dumbest timeline is that somehow Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has got wrapped up in the culture wars. Nolan’s use of color-blind casting and even (shock, horror) a trans actor has enraged the right to the extent that a good percentage of what passes for discourse on X nowadays seems to be devoted to conspiracy theories that the theaters are actually empty and that the world is rejecting Nolan’s newly-woke Homeric nonsense.
Enter Elon Musk to pour oil on troubled waters to fan the flames. “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,” he wrote on X, before offering the following as an example.
Musk hates Nolan’s Odyssey and has been briefing against it for months with various hot takes that we’re not going to dignify with repeating here. The one that we will talk about is his accusation that Nolan’s casting in the film (mainly the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon) was an attempt to get the movie on the Oscars list given the Academy’s new Representation and Inclusion Standards.
These have been live since 2024 and, as Variety points out, all 98 Best Picture winners to date since 1929 have passed the criteria. They’re a low bar, and certainly not why Nolan “desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award,” as Musk put it in one of his more colorful posts.
Perhaps more to the point, it will be very interesting to see if Grok Imagine can get anywhere close to anything epic other than producing an epic fail. The clip shared so far is poor even by AI movie-making standards, and laughably bad in several areas, such as when you look at the position of the rowers in the back of the galley in the main image. Nolan might have occasionally been free and easy with his interpretation of Homer, but at least he only bent light around his IMAX blimps with mirrors and didn’t fundamentally try to break the laws of physics.
Can consuming enough electricity to power Chicago and enough water to fill Lake Michigan (probably) make an AI version of the story anyone actually wants to watch? If, of course, it happens at all, and Musk doesn’t just get bored and move on as he's done to many times in the past.
So, we’ll give the last word to Nolan before we do the same.
He has little time fo AI-generated art, telling The Telegraph: “I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime. So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at [the younger] generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”
He added: “Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. They see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well.
“And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in film-making it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
Maybe another biopic would be a fun project…