Even as Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” rakes in ticket sales and critical praise, Elon Musk has petulantly insisted he could do a better job — or at least throw money at someone to make a film that better fits Musk’s aesthetic preferences.
Musk suggested on X this week that Grok Imagine, the latest generative version of his racist pet artificial intelligence chatbot, would produce a “full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Musk also responded positively to an X user’s pitch to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly accurate ships, armor, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.”
The notion that a “historically accurate” version of “The Odyssey” is required to counter Nolan’s is nonsensical.
Let’s set aside Gibson’s overly simplified forays into historical epic dramas. Criticism of “The Odyssey,” particularly on the right, is well documented. So is Musk’s history of making grand declarations that never come to fruition. The notion that a “historically accurate” version of “The Odyssey” is required to counter Nolan’s is nonsensical. Such a film would likely be the Greek mythology equivalent of DW Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in its white supremacist overtones and failure to grapple with nuance and human nature. In a word: unwatchable.
“The Odyssey” is a timeless tale not just for its title character’s tricks and triumphs amid gods and monsters. At its core, the story deals in the struggle between fate and free will and the things that we mortals owe each other, in life and in death. But while grand and epic, the original poem (at least the version translated by University of Pennsylvania professor Emily Wilson) is also deeply repetitive. This is a feature, not a flaw. The oral tradition in which “The Odyssey” was passed down among generations of Greeks required its performers to memorize hundreds of lines of poetry. It helps that certain language and descriptions, like “the deathless gods” or “the bright-eyed goddess,” come up again and again. But it’s hard to imagine a 24-book poem delivered line for line in the original hexameter. That would sound strange to a world more used to Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and hardly make for captivating filmmaking.
The backlash to Nolan’s film seems to fall into two broad categories: fury that the arms and armor are supposedly wrong for the Bronze Age period when the story is set and outrage that people of color, such as Travis Scott and Lupita N’yongo, feature in these works. The latter point is the product of a whitewashed version of history that ignores the Middle East and North Africa’s proximity to Greece. If Odysseus’s known world had the Mediterranean at its center, a panoply of skin tones only adds to the historicity.
But “The Odyssey” is set in a semifictional period in Greek history. Few records exist of the time before the Greek Dark Ages, between the Bronze Age collapse and the rise of “classical” Greece. While Sparta is named as one of the nations that went to war against Troy, there is no conclusive proof that there ever existed a King Menelaus, who went to war to recover his wife, Helen, let alone the city of Troy.
Historians and archaeologists have struggled to find real-world counterparts to many of the places Odysseus travels to in the poem. Even Ithica, the storm-tossed king’s home, has been impossible to pin down. Complaints about inaccuracy also seem wild when you consider, as Nolan recently told MS NOW host Joe Scarborough, props included “an entirely wooden boat built to ancient specifications,” which he filmed rolling across actual waves. (Those specifications could have been found in Book Five, where at least 20 lines are dedicated to Odysseus’ method of building a raft to leave the island where the goddess Calypso had kept him for eight years.)
Ultimately, it’s impossible to say that even the authorship of “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey” should be considered “historically accurate.” As Nolan told Scarborough: “Whether Homer is a he, she, they, no one really knows.” He’s right — and no doubt enraged many who don’t want to grapple with the fact that the tale may have sprung from more than one source and likely went through many iterations as unnamed bards and poets added their spin. Hundreds of years passed before the epic was written in texts that would later be translated into Latin and, eventually, English.
As culture writer John DeVore recently put it for MS NOW: “You want realism? Helen of Troy’s father is Zeus, the god of thunder. Zeus, who transformed into animals and seduced mortals. What are we doing here?” The people who complain about historical accuracy in “The Odyssey” are most likely the same joyless pedants who treat comic book lore as an immutable reality or insist that there are no Black people in space.
For Musk, a “historically accurate” work might simply be one that looks like it was made when white audiences could expect to see only themselves reflected on screen.
It’s also equally unlikely that they will wrestle with why the depictions they demand should be featured as entertainment fare today: namely, the slavery, misogyny and rape on display throughout Greek myth. Much of what was considered the peak of civilization to the ancients is rightly considered cruel and inhumane today. The term “barbarian” was coined to describe all those who lived outside of the Grecian world, but it is impossible to overlook the barbarity they themselves exhibited.
Norms shift and change; so, too, entertainment. If Musk really wants to sink millions into a film starring an artificial actor that few people are likely to watch all the way through, it’s his prerogative. He could even create a production studio for Gibson to oversee it. But it’s telling that the AI-produced clip that Musk shared seems lifted from the era of sword-and-sandal epics like “Ben-Hur.” For Musk, a “historically accurate” work might simply be one that looks like it was made when white audiences could expect to see only themselves reflected on screen.
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