Grok releases the first seven minutes of its AI-generated ‘Odyssey’

On October 25, Grok published seven minutes of AI-generated footage and labeled it “Episode 1 of our Odyssey series,” roughly three months after Elon Musk publicly promised a full-length, “historically accurate” movie version of The Odyssey.

According to TechCrunch, the segment was made with Grok Imagine, in a creative collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. The post invited viewers to comment if they wanted a full breakdown of how the footage was produced.

The project began as a pointed comparison. Musk had attacked Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey over its casting of nonwhite and transgender actors, and framed Grok’s version as the historically faithful alternative.

Nolan’s film sets a hard benchmark. Released in July, it became an extraordinary box office success, sold out Imax screenings for months and is seen as a likely front-runner at the next Academy Awards. It was primarily a feat of practical filmmaking, shot across six countries with a cast and crew numbering in the thousands.

TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha wrote that the Grok footage was not as spectacularly ugly as expected, and that some moments could pass for real actors sailing a real sea. But the narrator speaks with a familiar British accent, no one speaks ancient Greek, and the clip lacks any sense of artistry, inspiration or human interest.

The deeper problem is pacing. Ha described the result as “completely airless,” with no momentum and no reason to care about anyone on screen; he sat through nearly three hours of Nolan’s film, but was checking the runtime before the Grok version was halfway done.

For AI video, the significance of the release lies less in the seven minutes themselves than in the delivery model: a promise of a feature film has become a serialized, incrementally published product, and the quality bar is now being argued in public. What to watch next is whether later episodes fix continuity and characterization, and whether the full-length film Musk promised actually materializes.