Angered by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Elon Musk has vowed to make his own AI version of the tale this year. Here’s why he should: Ordinarily, the best approach with people like Elon Musk is to simply ignore them. They flap about on their social media platforms, puff their chests out and type absurd things ... Elon Musk absolutely should make his AI version of The Odyssey
Angered by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Elon Musk has vowed to make his own AI version of the tale this year. Here’s why he should:
Ordinarily, the best approach with people like Elon Musk is to simply ignore them. They flap about on their social media platforms, puff their chests out and type absurd things with the expectation that their stupid ideas will spread far and wide. Refuse to participate, and all those ideas die in obscurity where they belong.
It’s the old George Bernard Shaw thing about not wrestling pigs: “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
In the case of The Odyssey, though, I’m going to break my own rule. In recent days, Elon Musk has ordered the making of a “full-length movie” that is “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” This, he says, will be completed by the end of the year.
How on earth can anyone make a full movie in around five months? You probably know the answer: by using generative AI – specifically, Musk’s own Grok Imagine video-spewing platform.
This is the latest stage in the right wing mediasphere’s frankly bizarre campaign against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – a film whose mere existence sparked a cottage industry of angry web posts and YouTube videos arguing that its diverse casting is historically inaccurate and a blasphemy against Homer’s sacred text.
Always quick to jump on bandwagons, Musk has installed himself as one of the loudest voices in this campaign, raging against the casting of Lupito Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliott Page as the soldier Sinon – Nolan has “lost his integrity” for this cardinal sin, he wrote.
For months, there were predictions that The Odyssey was going to fail at the box office – the phrase ‘go woke, go broke’ often figured into this argument.
Then the film came out and was an instant hit.
Critics largely praised it; numbers from its opening weekend suggest that The Odyssey will be one of the biggest successes of Nolan’s career to date. The right wing mediasphere responded with a mixture of conspiracy theories, denial and sulking. The numbers were made up, one response went, with cinemas pretending to have sold more tickets than they actually did.
As his followers struggle to process the reality that their opinions carry far less weight than they initially thought, Musk attempted to provide some reassurance. He was going to use his resources to make a competing version of The Odyssey – one presumably without all the diverse casting that gave him a conniption fit a few months ago.
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Musk did a similar thing last year with Wikipedia; concluding that it was a vipers’ nest of liberals and woke opinion, he brought out the AI-generated Grokipedia – an online platform that pedals conspiracy theories, debunked pseudoscientific ideas and factually suspect nonsense. The multi-billionaire (and occasional trillionaire) later announced plans to send Grokipedia to the Moon, which is probably the best place for it.
As part of his rival Odyssey announcement, Musk shared a three-minute clip of AI-generated footage, which is presumably intended to provide an early taste of what a right-wing version of Homer’s epic will look like.
So terrible that, on reflection, I genuinely think that Elon Musk should bankroll a full feature-length version of it. I think he should spend at least $200m on marketing it, with posters in multiplexes and trailers in every commercial break. He should do the junket rounds in international hotels, explaining, over and over again, why he feels the need to make a version of the Odyssey with an all-white cast of non-existent AI actors when Christopher Nolan just made one of his own that most people really enjoyed.
Why? Because then the entire world gets a like-for-like comparison of the same story. In one corner we’ll have Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – a movie that, whether you’re a fan of Nolan or not, is made by a real filmmaker, with ideas and opinions and a specific taste in art.
On the other, we’ll have a flaccid, flatly-lit and ugly facsimile of a Hollywood epic – one that is borne out of petty grievance.
The three-minute clip boosted by Musk provides a glimpse of what audiences are in for. The digital actor playing Odysseus has all the charisma of a background performer in EastEnders’ Queen Vic. The dialogue is nonsensical; there are too many continuity errors to even count.
This is leaving aside that the clip doesn’t even fulfill the ‘historically accurate’ remit Musk set himself. First, it’s debatable how much of Homer’s Odyssey is even historical anyway; much of it is pure fantasy. Second, a film slavishly “true to the art of Homer” would be multiple hours long and spoken in a specific dialect of Ancient Greek. And with apologies to Musk’s followers, the actors shouldn’t all be healthy caucasians with immaculate teeth.
Musk isn’t, of course, interested in historical accuracy so much as surfing on yet another wave of trumped-up anger. But in this instance, Musk throwing his money into another ridiculous cause could do the entertainment world a service.
I’ve long maintained that, when confronted with the reality of a feature-length, AI-generated film, audiences will stay away in droves. Movies, like all storytelling, are about human experience; they’re about empathy and how we connect with each other – and the tragic things that sometimes arise when we fail to connect with each other.
They’re also reflections of tastes and ideas; we love a movie by Lynne Ramsay because we’ve come to understand and appreciate her view of the world and her personal way of presenting images. Christopher Nolan is one of directing’s few household names because he can bring a particular sensibility to a mass audience.
An AI-generated film can’t do this because it has no taste, no particular artistic leaning, and no life experience to fall back on. It’s the technology of pornography and propaganda precisely because those things don’t require much in the way of artistry or life experience (though they can contain both).
For anyone who argues that AI is just a tool, and that an artist can still make their voice heard through it, just take a look at District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s new short, Nightborne. It was, he says, made almost entirely with the AI video generator, Seedance. You can certainly see flickers of the filmmaker’s style in here, but they’re largely buried beneath the stilted dialogue, stuttering continuity and general feeling of uncanny valley eeriness.
Nightborne is certainly a marked step down from Blomkamp’s earlier work, and the online consensus seems to broadly agree. On YouTube, the video’s received hundreds of comments that express a mixture of disappointment and distaste.
“Wild to use AI to make an entire short film about using humans as disposable fuel for a soulless robot that replaces other people,” reads one reply.
If a filmmaker like Blomkamp gets responses like this, we can only imagine what reaction a theatrically-released take on The Odyssey produced by Elon Musk would induce. (Elsewhere, Musk said he was ‘down’ with the suggestion of personally giving Mel Gibson $100m to direct this Homeric calamity. I’d bet £5 from my wallet that he won’t do this.)
In summary: bring on The Grokyssey. Let the planet see just how terrible an AI-generated fantasy epic will look and sound. Give audiences the chance to compare a film prompted into existence from an air conditioned office with a piece of work made by real movie-makers.
The difference between the two, I suspect, will be so stark that it makes other filmmakers think twice about jumping on the AI bandwagon. Elon Musk took Twitter, an imperfect yet widely-liked social media platform, and ran it into the ground. Maybe he can achieve something even more spectacular with AI filmmaking.
