It began with a three-minute video, generated entirely by artificial intelligence, that appeared on the social media platform X. The clip, posted by an ordinary user, depicted a scene between the Greek hero Odysseus and the nymph Calypso, its visuals conjured by Grok Imagine, the image and video tool developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI. Within days, the video had been viewed more than 8.9 million times, yet it attracted only 140,000 likes and thousands of comments, most of them laced with mockery. One detail drew particular scorn: Odysseus appeared to be wearing what looked like a modern earpiece, a direct contradiction of Homer’s text, in which the hero keeps his ears unblocked to hear the Sirens’ song while his crew plug theirs with beeswax.

Musk seized on the clip, reposting it with a declaration that ricocheted across the film industry. “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,” he wrote. The billionaire, who has spent months attacking Christopher Nolan’s newly released adaptation of the ancient epic, separately offered US$100 million to actor-director Mel Gibson to shoot a version in Homeric Greek with “painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting.” The salvos were the latest in a campaign that began long before Nolan’s film reached cinemas, with Musk branding the director an “anti-White racist” for casting the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and mocking the transgender actor Elliot Page, who plays the soldier Sinon.

Nolan’s The Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX film across locations in Morocco, Greece, Sicily, Scotland and Iceland, opened to $264 million globally in its first weekend—the best debut of the director’s career—and has since become his most critically acclaimed work, with a 95 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Nyong’o, addressing the backlash in an interview with Elle, said: “Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defence. The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.” Nolan himself told The Telegraph that the pre-release outrage was “irrelevant,” noting that the complainants had not seen the film.

The cultural skirmish drew a sharp retort from Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson, who wrote on X: “Clearly Elon Musk doesn’t know s*** about cinema & he stopped reading in his 20s. His opinions on art are worthless.” Others pointed out the inherent absurdity of demanding historical accuracy from a poem populated by Cyclopes, sorceresses, and sea monsters. “Historically accurate like what? There’s a Cyclops. You do realise it’s a mythological poem, right?” one user commented. The AI-generated teaser, for all its views, became a lightning rod for derision rather than awe.

As the debate churns, the image of that three-minute clip lingers: a machine’s rendering of an ancient story, flawed in its details, yet potent enough to provoke a billionaire’s fantasy of supplanting one of the year’s most successful films with a version untouched by human hands—or, as Musk insists, truer to a poet who sang of gods and monsters three millennia ago.