Elon Musk is still mad about “The Odyssey.”
For months, he and his acolytes have been throwing an online tantrum about the casting of Christopher Nolan’s version of the ancient epic, particularly his choice to have the Black actress Lupita Nyong’o play Helen of Troy and the trans actor Elliot Page play the warrior Sinon. Now that the film is out, some conservatives have acknowledged that there’s nothing particularly woke about Nolan’s blockbuster tale of masculine honor and sacrifice. It takes liberties with the source material, as any Hollywood version would, but one of its chief departures is a moral framework that’s more Christian than pagan, which shouldn’t offend most social conservatives.
Nevertheless, Musk has been stewing. On Tuesday he promised to make a “historically accurate” A.I.-generated “Odyssey” movie by year’s end, posting an absurdly kitschy clip made by his Grok image generator. In doing so, he inadvertently highlighted one reason Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is so powerful — because it represents a revolt of the human in a world overstuffed with A.I. slop.
Despite its sprawling canvas, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is often strikingly intimate in scale and sparing in its use of computer-generated effects. “We like to spend a lot of time in real places, on real locations, having stuff in front of the camera that is tangible and tactile,” his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema told The New York Times. The Cyclops Polyphemus wasn’t an A.I. creation, but a 60-foot animatronic puppet. The Sirens are small figures in the distance, Hades a murky field. In The Telegraph, Robbie Collin described Nolan filming on a wooden ship amid a real-life storm that had extras clutching the sides and vomiting, creating the movie’s feeling of tempestuousness. Nolan knows how to build hyper-real fantasy realms, as he did in “Inception” and “Tenet,” but in “The Odyssey,” he’s opted for the earthy over the glossy and grandiose.
Some of the polarizing narrative choices Nolan has made seem downstream of this approach. The film does not create a lavish ancient dream world for viewers to get lost in. The gods are barely present, except for a subdued Athena played by Zendaya. “Nolan’s ‘Odyssey,’ unlike Homer’s, is a story completely disenchanted, devoid of the supernatural, aside from like the odd witch or two that shows up,” complained the right-wing influencer Matt Walsh, who compares the movie unfavorably to “Gladiator,” “The Lord of the Rings” and Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” The film’s stakes feel more psychological than mythic.
That seems to be exactly what viewers are responding to, turning “The Odyssey” not just into a hit but a cultural phenomenon, with some people traveling by plane for the chance to see it in IMAX 70 millimeter. (As The New York Post reported, Manhattan’s only theater to show the film in that format is sold out for every screening through Aug. 19.) There might seem to be a contradiction between its absence of eye candy and its success as a spectacle. But A.I. has rendered eye candy cheap. Viewers long for the visceral.
One of this year’s few pleasant surprises is that people are going back to the movies. During the pandemic, there were many predictions that movie theaters were dying, replaced by the comforts of streaming video. While the gloomiest forecasts proved overwrought, in recent years, the trend has still been one of decline. American box office sales were lower in 2024 than they were in 2023, and continued to disappoint in 2025. This year, however, is on track to be the best one for ticket sales since 2019. Young people, eager for communal experiences, have been flocking to theaters; according to a study by Fandango, Gen Z is now the most active moviegoing demographic.
What’s striking, though, isn’t just that people are returning to theaters, it’s the sort of films they’re going to. Recent movies that look artificial — including “Supergirl,” the live-action “Moana” and “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” — have flopped. By contrast, the low-budget horror movies “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” which rely on frightening premises rather than otherworldly imagery, have been enormous hits. “Audiences in 2026 are sending a clear message to filmmakers: We want movies to look real — and for you to sweat while making them,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd.
There is no greater champion of hands-on, analog filmmaking than Nolan, who doesn’t even own a smartphone. Speaking to The Telegraph’s Collin, he celebrated young people’s rejection of A.I. “I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” said Nolan. As a result, he said, “after years of driving toward heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
It is this ethos, more than multiracial casting, that makes “The Odyssey” a rebuke to Musk’s ideology, with its video game-derived visions of grandeur and conviction that algorithms can make art. He’s probably right to hate it. He’s wrong that his machines could ever conjure anything close.
