Elon Musk says the world doesn’t need Christopher Nolan’s version of Homer. It needs his AI’s.
“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,” the X owner wrote in a post on X Wednesday, July 22, tagging a three-minute AI-generated short a follower had built using his Grok Imagine tool.
It’s the latest shot in a monthslong campaign Musk has waged against Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY, which arrived in theaters July 17 and became the director’s biggest global opening ever. Musk’s grievance dates back to January, when rumors first surfaced that Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy.
Others jumped into the Nolan’s controversial casting choices. “We’re told that we shouldn’t object to Helen of Troy being portrayed as a black woman,” Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh argued, comparing it to how audiences might react if a white actress played “the most beautiful woman in Africa.”
Musk agreed in the comments: “Absolutely true. Such hypocrisy in Hollywood.”
He also blasted a rumor that trans actor Elliot Page would play Achilles, calling it “one of the dumbest and most twisted things I’ve ever heard.” While Page doesn’t play Achilles — the actor portrays Sinon, a Greek soldier borrowed from Virgil’s THE AENEID, not from Homer’s poem — Page’s casting choice still presents a worrying addition to the movie.
Nolan has mostly declined to engage with the outrage.
“Comes with the territory,” the director said of the backlash over historical accuracy. “These conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”
THE ODYSSEY pulled in $124.5 million domestically and $264.1 million worldwide on its opening weekend, earning an A CinemaScore and topping THE DARK KNIGHT RISES’ 2012 global launch to become Nolan’s biggest worldwide opening ever.
Musk’s promised Grok Imagine version wouldn’t be the first AI stab at Homer this summer. Days before Nolan’s movie opened, Movieguide® reported that Fountain 0, a startup betting its future on AI-made features, released ODYSSEUS: THE FALL — a $50,000, 135-minute movie built with the Kling video generator after OpenAI shuttered its Sora tool. Director Ash Koosha framed his tiny movie as a complement to Nolan’s, not a competitor, hoping curious moviegoers might “compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI.”
Whatever Grok Imagine eventually produces, “historically accurate” is an odd goal for a poem about a wandering warrior who blinds a cyclops, escapes a witch’s spell and outsmarts singing sirens. Homer wrote myth, not history, and no cast is more or less faithful to events that never happened.
Movieguide®’s own review of THE ODYSSEY raised real concerns about the movie’s “politically correct, revisionist history subtexts,” including Helen of Troy recast as African and a male soldier’s role played by a Page, a woman who thinks she’s a man. Those are fair questions for discerning families to weigh, and Movieguide®’s review weighed them plainly rather than pretending they weren’t there.
But the deeper story Nolan tells — a father’s hunger to reach home, a wife’s patience, a son grown up waiting on him — survives every casting argument thrown at it. No AI model improves that story by getting the armor color right. Grace and homecoming were Homer’s real subject long before any studio, or any chatbot, got hold of him.
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