Elon Musk’s Anti-Woke AI ‘The Odyssey’ Movie Ripped as “Soulless Slop” After Criticizing Nolan

Logo text Elon Musk is probably relieved filmmaker Alex Gibney’s highly critical four-hour documentary about the tech titan, Musk, has flopped at the box office and has been almost entirely pulled from theaters after just one week of wide release. But a new AI-created, anti-woke take on The Odyssey championed by Musk isn’t exactly a hit either. Musk, you’ll recall, repeatedly bashed Christopher Nolan‘s blockbuster take on the material over the summer and teased a Grok-created “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” version coming to his social media platform X. The first seven minutes of this AI-fueled take were released over the weekend (watch it below) and most viewers are ripping the result. A critic for The Telegraph wrote that the footage — made with AI specialists Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker — is “so unsettling you can feel your eyeballs twitch at its sloppy gruesomeness … the glassy-eyed characters, with their expressionless voices, give the episode a zombie-like quality … Penelope looks completely different in each scene … a take on the tale of Troy that deserves to be put to the sword, burned to the ground and hidden forever beneath the sands of time.” That said, the critic said the battle sequences “have some of the epic quality of Zack Snyder’s Spartan romp 300.” The most-upvoted viewer comment on the official X post says, “Holy f–k, this is absolute shit … as expected.” “Just soulless slop with no thought or anything…” agreed another. “This is the Odyssey flop Elon predicted,” chimed another. “The inability to effectively express emotion through high-quality acting in voice, carriage, and expression are all distracting,” wrote another. “This is definitely an example where writers and their creative artistry are severely under appreciated,” opined another. “The script feels flat and cliche. No matter how pretty you make something look, there has to be substance.” One has to scroll pretty far down the comments find some tempered praise: “There are subtle tiny things that feel ‘cgi.’ However, overall very impressive! Looking forward to more episodes. Would be great to see the approach on the prompts for sure!” To be fair, one suspects if this video had been released one year ago, responses would have been far more positive given the relative photo realism of the footage. The video is, to some extent, a sign of how quickly AI is evolving and how fast viewers are getting accustomed to its wonders that the chapter is being met with a collective diss and shrug. As of Monday, the video has racked up 6.8 million impressions (which isn’t actually too much considering a view can be triggered just by scrolling past the video, not by watching the full thing). Musk wrote several tweets earlier this year attempting to fuel a backlash to Nolan’s The Odyssey, writing in January that “Nolan has lost his integrity” after seeing reports of Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy. He also agreed with a conservative commentator calling the director a “coward” in May and tried to spur a conspiracy theory that Nolan only wanted diverse actors in the film to fulfill an Academy Awards inclusion requirement. Nolan’s film went on to make more than $1.78 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of his career.