Elon Musk has followed through on his promise to create a historically accurate version of The Odyssey using AI – and the reviews aren’t good.
On Friday night (October 23) X’s AI platform Grok shared the first episode of its AI-generated The Odyssey series, created using Grok Imagine in collaboration with AI filmmaking specialists Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker.
The project came about after X boss Elon Musk took issue with the casting of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and promised to create a “historically accurate” version of the Homer classic that was “true to [his] art” by the end of 2026.
Before the film was released, Musk accused Nolan of being an “anti-white racist” who had lost his “integrity” by casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. He also supported transphobic posts about Elliot Page, after some users incorrectly claimed that the actor had been cast as Achilles. Page plays the Greek soldier Sinon. Musk also accused Nolan of “desecrating Homer” to meet what he called the “woke rules required to win an Oscar”.
Nolan later dismissed the pre-release backlash as “irrelevant”, explaining: “No one having [those conversations] knows what the film actually is yet. What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”
Speaking about the backlash to her casting in the “mythological story” of The Odyssey, Nyong’o said: “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.”
The first clip of the Musk’s AI The Odyssey has been largely panned. “Holy fuck, this is absolute shit… as expected,” wrote one X user. “This looks like a film made by someone who has never watched a film,” said another. “Complete garbage. You’d have to pay me to watch more of this and even then I’d question my life choices. Colorless, lifeless, and forgettable in all the worst ways possible,” added a third.
This garbage is straight ass from a butt
https://t.co/9T5N13Qg4O
— Joker Narukami (@JokerNarukami) October 26, 2026
Others have pointed out the historical inaccuracies of the video. “Belt buckles, Medieval tunics and late Roman cloaks, Romanesque arches, zero Greek or Mycenaean mural paintings, everyone is dirty all the time… this is the worst kind of slop,” wrote one X user. “Pissing and moaning about historical accuracy just to make Greece look like Scotland,” said another. “Is it supposed to be historically correct? Why are they talking in English,” asked a third.
Classics professor Emily Wilson, who also wrote a translation of The Odyssey that inspired Nolan’s take on the poem, has also criticised the film adaptation. “Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the ‘apparent magic’ of deceptive images,” she wrote in an essay.
“We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognises that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.”
Despite this criticism, The Odyssey has been a resounding success both critically and commercially, earning Nolan the best reviews of his career and becoming his highest-grossing movie of all time.
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