Grok Releases First 7 Minutes of AI Version of 'The Odyssey,' Criticized for Lacking Artistic Appeal

Musk's Grok Releases First 7 Minutes of AI Version of The Odyssey, Criticized for Lacking Artistic Appeal

2026-10-26 07:30 IT Home - Yuanyang

Thanks to IT Home user Buyao Ya for the tip submission!

IT Home, October 26 news: Just three months after Elon Musk claimed that Grok would release a complete, "historically accurate" Odyssey film, Grok has released its first seven minutes and called it the first episode of the Odyssey series.

Musk had previously publicly attacked Christopher Nolan's Odyssey because Nolan cast non-white actors and transgender actors. In many ways, Nolan is a sharp contrast to Musk: the SpaceX and Tesla CEO keeps touting space data centers and continuously releases large amounts of AI-generated content, while Nolan calls himself a "technological skeptic" and has said that before AI appeared, he had never seen any technology "so thoroughly resisted by the public."

According to IT Home, although Nolan's Odyssey also uses extensive visual effects, it was mainly completed through practical shooting, with filming spanning six countries and involving thousands of actors and crew members. After its release in July, the film was a huge box-office success, with IMAX screenings sold out for months, and it will most likely be a hot contender at the next Academy Awards.

As for the Grok version of The Odyssey (co-produced by Grok, Wonder Studios, and director Dave Walker), viewers can watch and judge it for themselves.

Foreign media outlet TechCrunch's assessment is as follows:

To be honest, it is not as unwatchable as I expected, and the effect is indeed better than other AI videos Musk has recently released. Some segments, if I did not know better, I would even think were real actors sailing on a real sea. I cannot judge whether the Grok version is historically accurate, but the skin color of all the characters in the film seems to match Musk's preferences; the narration voice has a British accent, and anyone who has played fantasy video games or watched assembly-line Hollywood epics from the past twenty-five years will find this voice very familiar.

But what this footage lacks most is artistry, emotional appeal, and content that can move people. The story background is laid out entirely through the aforementioned narration, which is long and dragging. Once the narration finally ends, the screen shows one bearded figure after another, with stiff and awkward lines; by comparison, even the dialogue in Nolan's film could be called brilliantly written.

A few individual shots can barely simulate real footage, but the entire short film is lifeless: it has no narrative rhythm and cannot make the audience empathize with the people and events on screen. Nolan's Odyssey is nearly three hours long, and I was able to stay engaged throughout, but with this Grok version, before I had even watched half of it, I was already bored and constantly checking the remaining runtime.

It is hard to imagine being willing to watch another seven minutes of similar content, let alone a whole feature-length film.