You don’t hear the defenders of so-called western civilization talk much about The Odyssey these days.
Maybe that’s because their rabid denunciations of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic were buried in an avalanche of money. The July blockbuster has grossed nearly $1.8 billion worldwide, silencing the right-wingers who predicted a massive flop due to diverse casting and deviations from the source material.
Perhaps the loudest of these preemptive critics was Elon Musk. The world’s richest man spared no vitriol for what he considered a desecration of the ancient Greek narrative; four days after its release, he vowed to produce a superior version. “Before this year ends,” Musk wrote on X, “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
A little more than three months later—long after the discourse moved on—the public finally has a first glimpse of what we might call the Grodyssey, an Odyssey rendered through prompts fed into xAI’s video and image generation model. Rather than a “full-length movie,” it’s a seven-minute “episode” of an apparently ongoing series, depicting how Odysseus, King of Ithaca, resists a call to war against Troy but is ultimately compelled by an oath of loyalty to sail there with his army.
“Odyssey with Grok Imagine,” Musk announced Friday on X when sharing the clip, produced by AI entertainment company Wonder Studios X.
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