Musk's Grok AI 'Odyssey' Lands as a Faint Echo of Nolan's Epic

Elon Musk has released a seven-minute Grok AI "episode" of The Odyssey, the follow-through on his promise to make his own "better and more authentic" version after attacking Christopher Nolan's film. The verdict from the Guardian's critic is blunt: it is "as meaningless as a laptop screensaver."

The episode is now online, arriving to what the paper describes as a world that "has long since forgotten about this claim and didn't care in the first place."

Where did this come from?

The backstory matters here. Musk publicly condemned Nolan's Odyssey before seeing it, objecting to what he called its supposed wokery — specifically the casting of Elliot Page as Sinon and Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. He made the complaint, the Guardian notes, "in a weird online tantrum, and without having seen the film."

Then the film succeeded. Nolan's Odyssey stacked up what the paper calls plaudits and box-office receipts that "piled stratospherically up." Musk's response, according to the Guardian, was petulant: he claimed he could produce a superior, more authentic Odyssey using Grok, his AI platform. The writer adds a prediction with some confidence: "The only surprise would be if Musk accepted defeat graciously. Which he won't."

What does Musk's version actually show?

The seven-minute episode covers ground Nolan's film doesn't. It opens with a prologue sequence that is "not in Nolan," the Guardian points out.

The plot breaks down like this:

• Odysseus, off screen, is pretending to be mad to dodge service in the Trojan war.
• Palamedes and Agamemnon test the ruse by placing his baby son Telemachus in the path of a plough in a field.
• Odysseus breaks cover to save his child, proving his sanity, and agrees to fight.
• He joins the armada while Penelope and baby Telemachus stay behind; the boy, the piece notes, is "soon to grow to a little boy."
• The force reaches Troy, and an intertitle jumps the story ten years forward, to the moment the siege escalates toward the fake-horse attack.

So the content is faithful enough to Homer's outline. The problem, in the critic's framing, isn't the structure — it's the execution. An AI-generated Homer lands, in the Guardian's phrase, at the level of a screensaver: images without meaning.

What does this change for AI filmmaking?

Not much, on this evidence. The episode is a riposte made mostly for its author's own satisfaction, aimed at a film that had already won the argument at the box office. The dynamic the Guardian identifies — Musk's inability to lose gracefully, met by public indifference — suggests the remaining installments will draw attention for who made them, not how they were made. Until Grok can do more than animate a prologue, Nolan's epic stands unchallenged.