“I would rather pay to watch The Odyssey every day for the rest of my life, than watch this slop-a** s**t, even once,” reacted someone on X to the news that AI studio Fountain 0 made its own film based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic. Christopher Nolan might have spent north of $250 million to bring his version of the story to theaters this Friday, but Ash Koosha’s Odysseus: The Fall, a 135-minute AI-generated film, only cost around mid-five figures to pull off. If you add it up, that’s roughly 5,000 times cheaper than Nolan’s epic – which makes this the “Mom: we’ve got The Odyssey at home” meme made flesh.
Nolan’s The Odyssey has been challenged by rough waters in recent weeks. Elon Musk has spoken out against it, particularly around the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, its historical accuracy, the use of modern language in the film, and the lack of Greek actors in key roles. The film’s detractors have also been distractingly loud and have flooded social media with criticism, including disliking the trailer more than 700,000 times.
Still, Nolan is taking it in his stride, saying, “Comes with the territory.” In an interview with The Telegraph, he pointed out that his years on the Batman films prepared him for backlash like this. “When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents,” Nolan continued, “And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”
Reacting to the news about Odysseus: The Fall, one person on X even wrote, “Sc**w Nolan, let’s all get behind this. It looks cooler and it’s shorter runtime too!” Another person even backed him up by responding, “Look, I hate AI as the next one, but that looks infinitely better than whatever Nolan did.”
Odysseus: The Fall comes from Ash Koosha, the mind behind Dreams of Violets, the AI-generated Iranian protest docudrama that premiered at Tribeca in June. According to Variety, the director developed the entire project over three months using AI tools, including Kling for video generation and Anthropic’s Claude for language editing. It will also have 12 human likenesses, including the director’s own. He plays Odysseus.
But it’s the timing that is the issue here. Odysseus: The Fall releases in the same window as Nolan’s The Odyssey. Fountain 0 executive chairman Tom Rogers said the studio wants the AI film to work as a “reference point” that lets audiences directly compare the current ceiling of AI filmmaking against what he expects will be Nolan’s The Odyssey, what he calls “the highest state of human filmmaking achievement”.
But they’ve used this strategy before. Dreams of Violets, which cost about $2,000 to make, timed its Tribeca premiere to land while AI-generated film was already a live topic of festival debate. This time, they’re hoping to pit a film by one of the world’s greatest filmmakers against their own AI film. Worst of all, it sounds like they’ve actually found an audience.
And despite Rogers’ own admission that “I don’t think anybody is going to think this film is better than Nolan’s film,” I bet you’ll find a few who would argue otherwise.
Odysseus: The Fall will be available to rent or buy through Fountain 0’s own website later this summer, priced at $9.99.
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