Grok Releases First Seven Minutes of AI-Generated 'Odyssey' Series

Grok has published the first seven minutes of its AI-generated Odyssey, which the company is calling Episode 1 of its Odyssey series. The clip was made with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, and it arrived three months after Elon Musk said Grok would release a full-length, historically accurate film version of The Odyssey.

Grok Publishes Episode 1

Grok Imagine announced the release on X on October 23, crediting Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker as creative partners. The post invited viewers to watch and asked whether they wanted a full breakdown of how it was made.

Musk had earlier attacked Christopher Nolan's version of The Odyssey because Nolan cast nonwhite and transgender actors. The contrast is stark: Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, promotes data centers in space and posts a constant stream of AI-generated content, while Nolan has described himself as "a techno-skeptic" and said that before AI he had never seen a technology "so completely rejected by the public."

Nolan Film and Grok Project

Nolan's Odyssey used plenty of visual effects, but it was primarily a feat of practical filmmaking, shot across six countries with a cast and crew numbering in the thousands. Released in July, the film became a box office phenomenon, sold out Imax screenings for months and became the likely front-runner at the next Academy Awards. The Grok version is a separate project, assembled with Grok Imagine.

In his review for TechCrunch, Anthony Ha conceded that the result was "not as spectacularly ugly as I'd expected" and more impressive than other videos Musk has posted recently. At moments, he wrote, he could have mistaken the footage for real actors sailing a real sea. He could not speak to its historical accuracy, he added, though some fudging seemed necessary: nobody in the clip speaks ancient Greek.

Critique of the Clip

The characters, Ha wrote, come in what he called "a Musk-approved skin color," while the narrator speaks in a British accent that will sound familiar to anyone who has played a fantasy video game or watched a generic Hollywood epic of the past 25 years. What the footage lacks is any sense of artistry, inspiration or human interest.

The backstory, delivered in voiceover, seems to go on forever before giving way to one bearded face after another, each shouting stilted lines that make Nolan's own questionable dialogue ("Our age of bronze is collapsing!") sound like Shakespeare. A few individual shots offer a reasonable simulacrum of reality, but as a whole the clip feels airless, with no sense of momentum and no reason to care about anyone or anything on screen.

Ha sat through nearly three hours of Nolan's Odyssey without trouble, yet was listlessly checking how much time he had left before the Grok version was halfway through. Had it been a video game cutscene, he wrote, he would have hit skip. Another seven minutes is hard to imagine; a full movie's worth, harder still.

Sources: TechCrunch