Grok Releases 7-Minute AI Preview of The Odyssey, Highlighting Filmmaking Limits

IT Home reported on October 26 that three months after Elon Musk claimed Grok would release a complete, "historically accurate" film adaptation of The Odyssey, Grok released its first seven minutes, calling it the first episode of The Odyssey series.

Musk had previously publicly attacked Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey over Nolan's casting of non-white and transgender actors. In many ways, Nolan stands in sharp contrast to Musk: while the SpaceX and Tesla CEO continually touts space data centers and floods the internet with AI-generated content, Nolan describes himself as a "techno-skeptic" and remarked that prior to AI, he had never seen a technology "so utterly rejected by the public."

According to IT Home, although Nolan's version of The Odyssey made extensive use of visual effects, it relied primarily on practical, on-location shooting across six countries, involving thousands of cast and crew members. Following its July release, the film became a massive box-office hit, with IMAX screenings consistently sold out for months, making it a frontrunner for the upcoming Academy Awards.

As for Grok's version of The Odyssey (co-produced by Grok, Wonder Studios, and director Dev Walker), its quality is left for audiences to judge for themselves.

Foreign media outlet TechCrunch reviewed it as follows:

To be honest, it wasn’t as unwatchable as I had expected, and the results are indeed better than the other AI videos Musk has recently posted. In certain shots, had I not known better, I might have even thought it was real actors sailing on an actual sea. I cannot judge whether Grok's version is historically accurate, but the skin tones of all characters appear to align with Musk's preferences; the British-accented voiceover will sound intimately familiar to anyone who has played fantasy video games or watched formulaic Hollywood epics over the past twenty-five years.

Yet what this video lacks most is artistry, emotional resonance, and anything truly compelling. The backstory relies entirely on the aforementioned voiceover—drawn-out and tedious—and once the narration finally ends, the screen is filled with one bearded figure after another delivering stiff, awkward dialogue that makes the lines in Nolan's film seem remarkably poetic by comparison.

While a few isolated shots barely manage to simulate real footage, the entire short film is utterly lifeless, lacking narrative rhythm and failing to evoke any empathy for the people or events on screen. Nolan's The Odyssey ran nearly three hours and kept me fully engaged throughout, but with Grok's version, I was so bored that I kept checking the remaining runtime before I was even halfway through.

It's hard to imagine being willing to sit through another seven minutes of this, let alone an entire feature-length film.