IT之家 October 26 news: Three months after Elon Musk claimed that Grok would produce a complete, "historically accurate" Odyssey movie, Grok has released its first seven minutes, calling it the first episode of The Odyssey series.
Musk had previously publicly attacked Christopher Nolan's Odyssey because Nolan cast non-white actors and transgender actors. In many respects, Nolan is a stark contrast to Musk: the SpaceX and Tesla CEO keeps touting space data centers and continuously publishes large amounts of AI-generated content, while Nolan describes himself as a "technology skeptic," saying that before AI, he had never seen a technology "rejected so thoroughly by the public."
According to IT之家, although Nolan's Odyssey also makes heavy use of visual effects, it was primarily shot on location, with production spanning six countries and thousands of actors and crew members. After its release in July, the film was a box office success, with IMAX screenings sold out for months on end, and it is likely to become a hot contender at the next Academy Awards.
As for the Grok version of The Odyssey (co-produced by Grok, Wonder Studios, and director Dev Walker), we'll leave it to readers to watch and judge for themselves.
Foreign outlet Techcrunch reviewed it as follows:
Honestly, it wasn't as unwatchable as I expected, and the results are indeed better than other AI videos Musk has released recently. In some clips, if I hadn't known better, I might even have thought they showed real actors sailing on real seas. I can't judge whether the Grok version is historically accurate, but the skin tones of all the characters look consistent with Musk's preferences; the narration has a British accent that anyone who has played fantasy video games or watched the assembly-line Hollywood epics of the past twenty-five years will find very familiar.
But what this footage most lacks is artistry, emotional power, and content that moves the audience. The story's background is entirely conveyed through the aforementioned narration, which is long-winded and sluggish; once the narration finally ends, the screen fills with one bearded character after another delivering stiff, awkward lines — by comparison, the dialogue in Nolan's films could be called eloquent.
A few individual shots can barely simulate real footage, but the whole short film is lifeless, with no narrative pacing, and fails to make viewers empathize with the people and events on screen. Nolan's Odyssey is nearly three hours long, and I was engaged throughout; with the Grok version, I was less than halfway through before I was bored enough to keep checking the remaining runtime.
It's hard to imagine being willing to watch another seven minutes of this kind of content, let alone an entire feature film.