We’d Rather Live Through the Trojan War Than Spend 135 Minutes Watching an Entirely AI Version of “The Odyssey”

Many moviegoers this summer are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “The Odyssey.” But have you considered that you could watch a pure AI slop adaptation of the Greek epic instead? Enter “Odysseus: The Fall,” a fully AI-generated movie from the startup Fountain 0. At 135 minutes long, it will certainly test your patience as it hurls screensaver-grade images at you which look cribbed from better movies, creating the impression that this is really a generic amalgamation of other people’s ideas about what Greek mythology should look like, rather than the creators’ own. The director, Ash Koosha, told Hollywood Reporter it cost in the “mid-five figures” to make, and openly hopes to cash in on the hype around Nolan’s film. “We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, ‘The Odyssey,’ is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha said in a wordy statement. You have to wonder if Koosha has ever asked Nolan’s thoughts on AI. In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning director was skeptical about the tech, praising Gen Z for “utterly rejecting” for what he described as “AI slop.” The official synopsis for Koosha’s film sounds suspiciously AI-generated. The film, Fountain 0 says, focuses on “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes — a voyage that is really a trial, where every monster wears his own handwriting,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Stripped of the word ‘clever,'” it continues, “what remains is a man reckoning with what he actually did to get home. It ends where the songs never go: not with a hero’s welcome, but with forgiveness offered by the one person who knows exactly what he is.” Wears his own handwriting? Stripped of the word clever? We implore you to guess what any of that means. A short teaser released by the studio promises that the film will be as sloppy as its synopsis suggests. The footage is impressively photorealistic, but has all the aesthetic trappings of AI, with cliche shots and a familiar uncanny sheen. It was all assembled together in three months, Kosha says, and we can tell. Kosha enthused about the loose production style that AI afforded, allowing him to constantly fine-tune the footage to meet what Variety generously describes as Kosha’s “unconstrained vision.” “We’re in post production right now. Still, the script is open to interpretation,” Koosha told the trade publication. “Why? Because the risks don’t exist,” he added, cryptically. Why this half-baked AI slop-tacle is getting glowing write-ups in Variety and THR when there’s plenty of promising indie movies made at shoestring budgets that don’t even get a sniff at recognition is anyone’s guess. But at the same time, it’s not surprising. In June, The Wall Street Journal contributed to the hype cycle around the AI-generated flick “Hell Grind” when it erroneously reported it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. In reality, it was shown in another Cannes event out of competition. More on AI: AI “Actor” Will “Star” In a New “Movie”