Elon Musk has said his AI platform Grok Imagine will make a “historically accurate” adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, after the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbusting treatment which the SpaceX founder has regularly criticised over its casting.
In a post on X, Musk said: “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Musk also linked to a post containing a three-minute clip of footage that the user said had been generated from Grok Imagine, showing a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso.
Musk has been attempting to stoke a culture war around Nolan’s film, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and was released on Friday to near-universal acclaim and achieved impressive box office results. Before the film was released, Musk reposted abusive messages aimed at Nolan’s casting of Black actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, and trans actor Elliot Page as Sinon, adding that “[Nolan] wants the awards” and that “[he] has lost his integrity”.
However, Musk’s efforts appear to have had little effect, with The Odyssey taking US$264m (£196m, A$378m) at the global box office in its opening weekend and a 97% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In May, Nyong’o responded to rightwing critics, saying: “Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defence. The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not”. More recently, Nolan said the backlash “comes with the territory”, saying: “These conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”
The director was also withering in his assessment of the likely impact of artificial intelligence on film-making, saying: “The idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s a nonsense.” He added: “I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected.”
