Musk's AI-Made "Odyssey" Is Out, and the First Review Hits the Skip Button

A few months ago, Elon Musk promised that Grok would make a full-length, "historically accurate" movie version of The Odyssey. Now we have a first look. Grok Imagine posted about seven minutes of footage on October 23, calling it Episode 1 of an Odyssey series. It was made with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker.

There's a lot of backstory here. Christopher Nolan's own film of The Odyssey came out in July, made the old-fashioned way with mostly practical effects, filming in six countries and with thousands of cast and crew. It became a huge hit, sold out IMAX screens for months and is now seen as the likely favorite at the next Oscars. Musk publicly criticized it for casting nonwhite and transgender actors. Nolan, for his part, calls himself a techno-skeptic and has said he's never seen a technology so completely rejected by the public as AI. So this AI version was always going to be read as a jab.

How is it? TechCrunch's Anthony Ha gave it some credit. It looks better than the other AI videos Musk has shared, and a few shots could almost pass for real actors on a real sea. But that's about where the praise stops. He found the long voiceover dull, the dialogue stiff, and the whole thing lacking any spark or reason to care about the characters. He sat through Nolan's nearly three-hour movie without checking his watch but kept looking at the clock during these seven minutes. If it were a video game cutscene, he says, he'd have skipped it.

This is a big test of whether AI can make something people actually want to watch, not just something that looks impressive in a clip.

Would you watch a full AI-generated movie, or does it need a human behind the camera to work?

Nolan vs. Musk: can an AI-generated movie ever compete with a human-made epic