Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey reviews: An eye-twitching epic bore
The glassy-eyed characters had the warmth of a zombie-hostage video
Good news: He half delivered. Bad news: it’s the boring half.
On October 27, Musk posted the first seven minutes of the project on X, billing it as “Episode 1 of our Odyssey series”. The project is a collaboration between director Dev Walker, London-based Wonder Studios and Grok Imagine, the AI video generator from Musk’s own AI company.
Musk had previously slammed Nolan’s version as too 'woke', objecting in particular to Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. He accused Nolan of casting Black actors because he “wants the awards”. True to form, Musk’s version features no people of colour. The visual style, meanwhile, recalls the sword-and-sandal epics that once filled television schedules on sleepy Sunday afternoons.
Critics were quick to weigh in. The Guardian awarded it one star out of five, calling it “ponderous and inert” and comparing its visuals to a classical-era Call of Duty. The Telegraph was even less impressed, describing footage so unsettling “you can feel your eyeballs twitch”. Its glassy-eyed characters, the paper suggested, had all the warmth of a zombie hostage video.
That reaction almost makes you wish the film were worse. A spectacular disaster might at least be entertaining. Instead, Musk’s “Odyssey” appears to have achieved something more dispiriting: a polished, competent-looking epic that struggles to make an impression.
There are vast fleets, sea battles and men on horseback. Generative AI has the familiar ingredients down: grizzled beards, British accents and sweeping vistas, assembled from the visual vocabulary of countless epics before it. But the early footage has drawn criticism for what those ingredients fail to produce: characters who feel like actual people. That is a stark contrast with Nolan’s more human-centred take, anchored by Matt Damon as Odysseus.
The writing has not escaped scrutiny either. “There was once a king whose coming knew no equal,” a narrator intones gravely. “But an old oath bound him to a distant war. To escape it, he played a madman.”
Homer, by comparison, gets straight to the point. Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation opens by asking the Muse to sing of a “complicated man” who wandered and got lost after sacking Troy. One is a 2,800-year-old masterpiece; the other sounds like a voiceover written to accompany a trailer for one.
X users had their own notes. They pointed to the jumpy cuts, with one suggesting viewers could practically see where one text prompt ended and the next began. Others picked apart the uncanny faces and the irony of a supposedly “historically accurate” ancient Greek epic performed entirely in modern English.
Not everyone dismissed the experiment. Some users praised it as a step forward for generative video. Progress is progress, even when it’s wearing sandals.
Musk, notably, made no mention of Nolan when he posted the footage. Instead, he appeared more interested in the technology behind it, inviting viewers to comment if they wanted “a full breakdown of how it was done”. The emphasis was on the making, rather than the story – a distinction that may explain why the footage has prompted more discussion about AI than about Homer.
It is, perhaps, a fitting project for a man who has often suggested that we are living in a simulation.
Back in July, Musk promised a feature-length version by the end of the year. With just over two months to go, there is no word on when Episode 2 will arrive, how many episodes the series will contain, or whether Odysseus will acquire a personality before reaching Ithaca.
Meanwhile, Nolan’s film, shot with practical effects in real locations by real humans, has quietly collected $1.79 billion worldwide, making it the second-biggest box-office hit of the year.
Homer might call that a homecoming.
