Elon Musk’s anti-Odyssey tantrum reaches delusional new heights

Oh, spare us.

Elon Musk, clutching tight his title of world’s most odious troll, has threatened to make and release his own version of The Odyssey to counter Christopher Nolan’s cinematic epic, which he has been blasting for months.

Now that Nolan’s film is out, and making bucketloads of money (translation: an opening weekend of $US264 million), Musk figured this is the ideal time to re-insert himself into the conversation. There’s no suggestion the, oh boy, trillionaire has actually seen Nolan’s film.

So, you know this particularly deranged culture war he’s waging must be in good faith, right? Because Elon, the man who swore he wasn’t making a Nazi salute (twice) last year despite what we all saw with our eyes, would never act without integrity, right?

Musk has said his definitely not defective Grok AI will make a full-length version of Odyssey “that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer”.

Where do we start?

Has anyone told Musk about cyclops? Or giants, sirens, sea monsters that attack from the sides of cliffs? How about a sorceress who can turn men into pigs? A trip to the underworld? All those fantastical elements will obviously fit nicely into that so-called historical accuracy.

What about the fact that no one is certain that Homer ever existed as an individual given there is no historical record, and the tales of Iliad and Odyssey stemmed from oral storytelling traditions for decades perhaps centuries before they were written down.

Look, we know what Musk is referring to when he says “historical accuracy”. He was having a white supremacy-laced tantrum about Nolan’s diverse casting.

For months, Musk has railed against a film he hasn’t seen, starting in January when it emerged Lupita Nyong’o had likely been cast as Helen of Troy.

Oh noes, he and his ilk cried. Nyong’o, a luminous Oscar-winning actor, couldn’t possibly embody the woman whose beauty started a war, they stropped. Because, well, the obvious racism doesn’t bear repeating.

Then it was the unfounded rumours transgender actor Elliot Page had been tapped to play Achilles. Musk and his transphobic crybaby supporters didn’t like that at all.

All of a sudden, these people found a heretofore hidden appreciation for the (honestly, not very good) 2004 movie Troy, in which Helen had been portrayed by the white, blonde actor Diane Kruger and Achilles was played by Brad Pitt, also white and blonde.

These are the “accurate” representations of two fictional characters, they cried! Don’t worry that neither were Greek – Kruger is German and Pitt is American.

What Musk and his oh-so-enlightened gang also missed is that Helen of Troy was born from an egg. Not egg as in ova, one-half of a human embryo. Egg as in what you had for breakfast this morning. Like, poultry.

In the myths (also known as fairy tales), Helen was the daughter of Leda and Zeus, the king of the gods having disguised himself as a swan and tricked Leda into copulating with him (these days, we call that rape).

In some versions of the story, Helen’s sister Clytemnestra was her twin and both gestated in that egg. How can you argue that a character born from an egg has a historically accurate representation, let alone a singular one?

Musk is, allegedly, not short in the IQ department, but he is the embodiment that being dumb and being an idiot is not the same thing.

Musk accused Nolan of only casting diverse actors because he wants to win more awards, erroneously hinting at the Academy Awards’ diversity rules.

Unsurprisingly, Musk is wrong. Those rules are not as rigid as requiring a percentage of onscreen roles be given to non-white actors. The requirements are loosely spread out across a production over various departments, and can even be expanded to be at a studio level.

Before the film’s release, Nolan addressed the backlash from that small but noisy part of the right, without naming Musk specifically.

“These conversations that happen before people see the film, they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,” he said.

Well, now, lots of people have seen the film, and it has near universal acclaim from reviewers and audiences, and none of the good faith criticisms have centred on The Odyssey’s casting or alleged “historical” inaccuracy.

Because, again, you know, it’s fiction. And even though Odyssey is rooted in a historical era and place, versions of the story have morphed over time.

Stories are always re-interpreted by whichever artist takes it on, and it will inevitably reflect the context in which it’s born again. Nolan can no more separate himself from his context than anyone who has read or heard an iteration of Odyssey in the past three millennia.

And you know what, people are very much into Nolan’s interpretation.

According to audience surveys in the US, moviegoers cited Nolan as the top reason for why they were watching The Odyssey, which reinforces the idea that the British filmmaker is a bigger cinema star than any of his A-list cast, which included Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron and Zendaya.

Does anyone with any taste really think a Grok AI version is going to be better than the one made with painstaking care by one of the most well-regarded filmmakers working today?

Recently, Nolan made his scepticism about AI quite clear, likening it to a glass Trojan Horse.

“The idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s nonsense,” he said.

“I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected.

“Everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people. The reaction to AI videos online and people my children’s age immediately calling it ‘AI slop’ and coining that term and just putting it in a box, which I think is a very healthy scepticism.”

The combination of a Musk-created AI version of Odyssey sounds exactly like something you would put in a box clearly labelled “SLOP”.

It was another filmmaker, Scott Derrickson (The Black Phone, Doctor Strange), who summed up Musk’s grievances best.

He posted on social media, “Clearly Elon Musk doesn’t know s—t about cinema and he stopped reading in his 20s. His opinions on art are worthless.”