{"id":452,"date":"2026-07-24T11:13:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:13:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=452"},"modified":"2026-07-24T11:13:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:13:42","slug":"the-folly-of-elon-musks-call-for-a-historically-accurate-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=452","title":{"rendered":"The folly of Elon Musk\u2019s call for a historically accurate \u2018Odyssey\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Even as Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d rakes in ticket sales and critical praise, Elon Musk has petulantly insisted he could do a better job \u2014\u00a0or at least throw money at someone to make a film that better fits Musk\u2019s aesthetic preferences.<\/p>\n

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Musk suggested on X this week that Grok Imagine, the latest generative version of his racist pet artificial intelligence chatbot, would produce a \u201cfull-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.\u201d Musk also responded positively to an X user\u2019s pitch to \u201cgive 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s set aside Gibson\u2019s overly simplified forays into historical epic dramas. Criticism of \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d particularly on the right, is well documented. So is Musk\u2019s history of making grand declarations that never come to fruition. The notion that a \u201chistorically accurate\u201d version of \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d is required to counter Nolan\u2019s is nonsensical. Such a film would likely be the Greek mythology equivalent of DW Griffith\u2019s \u201cThe Birth of a Nation\u201d in its white supremacist overtones and failure to grapple with nuance and human nature. In a word: unwatchable.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d is a timeless tale not just for its title character\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d 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 \u201cthe deathless gods\u201d or \u201cthe bright-eyed goddess,\u201d come up again and again. But it\u2019s 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\u2019s iambic pentameter and hardly make for captivating filmmaking.<\/p>\n

The backlash to Nolan\u2019s 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\u2019yongo, feature in these works. The latter point is the product of a whitewashed version of history that ignores the Middle East and North Africa\u2019s proximity to Greece. If Odysseus\u2019s known world had the Mediterranean at its center, a panoply of skin tones only adds to the historicity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d 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 \u201cclassical\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s 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 \u201can entirely wooden boat built to ancient specifications,\u201d 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\u2019 method of building a raft to leave the island where the goddess Calypso had kept him for eight years.)<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it\u2019s impossible to say that even the authorship of \u201cThe Iliad\u201d or \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d should be considered \u201chistorically accurate.\u201d As Nolan told Scarborough: \u201cWhether Homer is a he, she, they, no one really knows.\u201d He\u2019s right \u2014 and no doubt enraged many who don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

As culture writer John DeVore recently put it for MS NOW: \u201cYou want realism? Helen of Troy\u2019s father is Zeus, the god of thunder. Zeus, who transformed into animals and seduced mortals. What are we doing here?\u201d The people who complain about historical accuracy in \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 \u201cbarbarian\u201d was coined to describe all those who lived outside of the Grecian world, but it is impossible to overlook the barbarity they themselves exhibited.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s his prerogative. He could even create a production studio for Gibson to oversee it. But it\u2019s telling that the AI-produced clip that Musk shared seems lifted from the era of sword-and-sandal epics like \u201cBen-Hur.\u201d For Musk, a \u201chistorically accurate\u201d work might simply be one that looks like it was made when white audiences could expect to see only themselves reflected on screen.<\/p>\n

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The billionaire doesn\u2019t seem to understand that there\u2019s no such thing as a \u201chistorically accurate\u201d myth \u2014\u00a0or how bad his version would likely wind up being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe folly of Elon Musk\u2019s call for a historically accurate \u2018Odyssey\u2019 - Long Distance Movers USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=452\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The folly of Elon Musk\u2019s call for a historically accurate \u2018Odyssey\u2019 - 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