Grok Imagine’s Odyssey Episode 1 is on X here, posted on 23 October. X doesn’t allow it to be embedded on other sites.
Odysseus took ten years to get home from Troy. Elon Musk’s version is going to need a fair turn of speed, then, because the first instalment of his AI-generated Odyssey has arrived with just over two months left on the clock. On Friday 23 October, the Grok Imagine account on X posted “Episode 1 of our Odyssey series made with Grok Imagine”, a little over seven minutes long and in 4K. It was made with Wonder Studios, a London-based AI production company, and a director credited as Dev Walker. Musk quote-posted it that night with the caption “Odyssey with Grok Imagine”, and Wonder Studios added, “Homer didn’t have Grok… we do.” The original post had been viewed more than four million times by Sunday, going by the counter shown when the critic Dan Barrett embedded it, and X counters have been known to be generous.
A frame from Grok Imagine’s Odyssey Episode 1. Image: Grok Imagine/X.
Seven minutes is not what was promised. On 22 July, Musk posted: “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.” That was days after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened on 17 July, and the phrase “historically accurate” was doing a lot of work. Musk had already spent much of the year objecting to Nolan’s casting, chiefly of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. In January he posted that “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity”, and in May he suggested of the casting, “He wants the awards.” He has also amplified posts mocking Elliot Page, who plays Sinon. Grok then ran a $100,000 contest for short Odyssey clips, which TechRadar noted was won by an entry featuring a three-eyed Cyclops. That is two more eyes than Homer gave him, and it rather set the tone for the accuracy drive.
Which brings us to the obvious problem with a “historically accurate” Odyssey. It is a poem in which a witch turns sailors into pigs, a one-eyed giant eats the crew, the dead are summoned with a pit of blood, and the hero’s patron goddess keeps turning up disguised as someone’s mate. Historians and archaeologists have spent a century and a half arguing about whether there was a real Troy at all. You can be true to Homer, or you can be historically accurate, but doing both at once is rather like asking for a documentary about Middle-earth.
As for the episode itself, the early reviews are not kind. TeslaNorth describes a bearded hero in a dark cloak, a woman holding an infant, a carved wooden horse, and black-sailed ships on a grey sea. TechCrunch reports a British-accented narrator. Its reviewer Anthony Ha said the clip was “not as spectacularly ugly as I’d expected”, but that it “feels completely airless”, and he admitted to “listlessly checking how much time I had left”. The AV Club called it “as uninspired as expected”, and said it played “less like the start of a cohesive feature film and more like a choppy trailer or sizzle reel.” Meanwhile Nolan’s film has taken about $1.78bn worldwide, is Universal’s biggest release ever, and is being talked up as the Best Picture front-runner. Nolan, who describes himself as “a techno-skeptic”, has said he has never seen a technology “so completely rejected by the public”.
Science fiction has, of course, been here before. Huxley’s Brave New World had the feelies, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 had parlour walls that played endless, empty drama to people who no longer read. Neither imagined the machine-made epic arriving as a seven-minute post on a social network, with the owner’s caption underneath and a culture-war row as its trailer. Whether Grok can deliver the rest of the voyage by New Year’s Eve is anyone’s guess. Homer, at least, knew that the long way home is the whole point of the story.
Join the conversation (0)