An AI Studio Made Its Own Odyssey and Timed It to Nolan's Opening

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens today, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm for a reported $250 million. Three days before it reached theaters, an AI studio announced an Odyssey of its own: 135 minutes long, made largely by one person over three months, for a budget in the mid five figures.

Odysseus: The Fall comes from Fountain 0, a London outfit that bills itself as the leading AI movie studio, and from director Ash Koosha, who cast his own face as Odysseus and sourced twelve human likenesses from people in his network. The imagery was rendered with Kling. It runs as long as a real feature, and it will rent for $9.99 on the studio's own site later this summer rather than play in a single theater. The teaser is below.

The reception has been roughly what you would guess. "Rancid slop" and "AI parasite" were among the more printable reactions, and the specific complaints are the familiar ones: the dialogue is stilted, the faces have no interior life, and the whole thing has the texture of something described rather than filmed.

Koosha's own argument is more interesting than the stunt around it. He says AI "is a threat to nothing except distance, the distance between a person with a story and the means to tell it," and that "a tool has never made a film worth watching. A person with something urgent to say has made every one of them, and that won't change." He has also said he hopes Nolan's film is a hit, and that his version might send people toward it. His last feature, made for about $2,000, became the first fully AI-generated film to screen at Tribeca, so the claim that he is only chasing a headline is harder to make than it looks.

Still, the comparison the studio invited is the one worth sitting with. Nolan's film exists because a crew dragged the largest film cameras ever built to real places and pointed them at real faces, and that is most of the reason to go see it. The other one exists because a man typed for three months. Audiences can tell the difference right now, and they are saying so loudly. The uncomfortable question isn't whether this AI Odyssey is any good — it plainly isn't. It's what the argument sounds like when the next one is merely mediocre instead of bad, and still costs almost nothing to make.

Lead image: official key art for Odysseus: The Fall, courtesy Fountain 0. The film, and its artwork, are AI-generated.