Where to watch the Elon Musk Odyssey, and why Grok panned it

The episode lives on X, posted by the Grok Imagine account as the first part of what it calls its Odyssey series. The post credits a collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, who both work in AI-generated filmmaking. It isn’t on any streaming service, and there’s no paid version.

The post invited viewers to say in the comments whether they’d like a full breakdown of how it was made. The announcement didn’t include a date for a second episode.

Here’s the twist that surprised fans of the poem: the episode isn’t really about the Odyssey’s famous journey home. It’s a prologue. Odysseus fakes madness to avoid going to war, and Agamemnon and Palamedes test him by putting his infant son, Telemachus, in front of a plough. He saves the child, gives himself away, and agrees to fight.

From there he leaves Penelope and the boy behind, joins the fleet and lands at Troy. A title card then jumps ten years ahead, with the siege about to turn into the wooden-horse trick. Early on, Penelope hands him a small wooden horse, a bit of foreshadowing reviewers found heavy-handed.

Homer’s poem mostly follows Odysseus trying to get back to Ithaca after the war ends, so this series is starting years before the poem itself does. Expect the famous monsters and the long sail home to come later, if at all.

Odysseus is the only character named on screen. Unless you know the story well, you’ll struggle to tell the rest apart.

The complaints fall into three groups, and they’re the same problems people see in most AI video today.

• The faces and hair. Characters have flawless teeth, waxy or smudgy skin and hair that drifts as if underwater. Backgrounds visibly sharpen as you watch, a bit like a video game loading textures.
• The voices. Every character speaks in the same flat, over-stressed delivery, and they talk in modern English with British accents.
• The story. Scenes crash into each other, the emotional beats land with no build-up, and the battle footage feels like stock video.

Then there’s the accuracy question, which Musk made the point of the whole exercise. Viewers spotted belt buckles, medieval-style tunics and late Roman cloaks, and the ships look more Viking than Greek. When reporters asked Grok itself whether the episode was historically accurate, the chatbot said no, calling it an adaptation of Homer rather than a reconstruction of real events. Homer’s poem is myth, not history, so a historically accurate version was always a strange goal.

The project began as a response to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Musk spent months criticizing that film online, objecting in particular to its casting choices, and in February he wrote on X that Nolan had lost his integrity. His Grok version was pitched as the alternative.

The numbers tell you how that contest went. Nolan’s film opened to $124.5 million in July, very big for an R-rated movie close to three hours long. It has since grossed more than $1.7 billion worldwide, with some estimates nearer $1.8 billion, on a budget of $250 million. Nolan has said the idea of AI replacing human creativity is “a nonsense.”

Musk’s version cost a tiny fraction of that. That’s the real argument behind AI video: not that it’s better, but that it’s far cheaper and faster to make. A tracking site that follows Musk’s public pledges puts his hit rate at about 24 percent, so delivering any episode at all counts as following through.

For ordinary viewers, the Odyssey episode is a useful reality check. Tools like Grok Imagine can turn out cinematic-looking shots in minutes, but stretching them into a coherent story with consistent characters is still hard. Even here, a reviewer noticed Penelope’s appearance changing between scenes.

It also shows how these projects get made now. A small studio, one director and an AI video model produced this episode. Nolan’s version needed a $250 million budget and a big studio behind it. Whether audiences will sit through the results is a separate question, and this first test hasn’t gone well.

Expect to see a lot more short AI dramas in your feeds, because they’re cheap to produce and get attention, good or bad. The tells to look for are the ones critics listed: perfect teeth, floaty hair, faces that twitch while talking, and voices with no rhythm. Spotting them is getting more useful as these clips get harder to tell from the real thing.