Elon Musk’s AI ‘The Odyssey’ Is One Of The Worst Movies I’ve Ever Seen

Well, he finally did it. Sort of. Elon Musk talked a big game about producing an entirely AI movie based on The Odyssey that was faithful to the source material. He has now released a short “Part 1” of that film, and it’s quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever watched.

On the one hand, it’s pretty remarkable to see what AI is capable of achieving, and if you took me back in time a decade and showed me this video and told me it was made entirely by prompting a computer, I would have been pretty blown away.

But watching this now, and even setting aside the political and economic factors here, it’s just awful. It’s almost laughably awkward, with stilted dialogue and lifeless characters who are rendered so close to what actual humans look like that the Uncanny Valley effect kicks in incredibly hard as soon as they talk or move or make their weird, creepy smiles. Why does that one guy keep smiling so much? Creepy .

On top of the general lifelessness of this “movie” the dialogue and narration is painfully bad, doing next to nothing to establish character or stakes or even the basic premise of the story. Nor does the film feel particularly authentic to the time period or setting, though it avoids the things that really upset Musk: race-swapping and a transgender cast member.

These empty-eyed creatures are more of a betrayal of Homer’s work than casting a Black woman to play Helen of Troy. Why is Penelope looking one way and Odysseus looking the other? It’s weird! And it’s weird how Penelope keeps looking like totally different people, and how time passes, and how there’s an ox and a horse apparently pulling the plough that Odysseus is originally working. The whole thing is just extremely bizarre and unintentionally creepy. If you can get past the ick factor, it’s quite funny. Unintentionally funny, of course.