Homer Epic ‘The Odyssey’ Gets A Full-Length AI-Generated Film

"Odysseus: The Fall" features an Odysseus based on the AI-generated likeness of the film’s creator, Ash Koosha.

Fountain 0

Soon after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrives in theaters on Friday, an entirely AI-generated version of Homer’s ancient epic will sail onto screens.

Nolan’s film, shot on 70mm IMAX cameras, is already pulling in positive early reviews. It stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, king of Ithaca, voyaging home after the Trojan War. Odysseus: The Fall features an Odysseus based on the likeness of the film’s creator, Ash Koosha, co-founder of AI film studio Fountain 0.

Odysseus: The Fall chronicles Odysseus’ emotional and spiritual journey from inside the water. It will be available to stream later this summer. Fountain 0 says it intentionally timed the debut on the heels of a major Hollywood release, according to Tom Rogers, executive producer of the film.

“We wanted to provide a basis of comparison in the same time frame with a movie coming from one of the world's most revered directors,” Rogers said in a statement, “so moviegoers might be curious enough to see both films developed out of the same classic tale as a way to better understand the level at which AI is able to both contribute already to the art of filmmaking, and to increasing the number of quality films that can be offered to the public.”

Rogers says the studio also wanted to demonstrate that artificial intelligence can democratize ambitious filmmaking. Odysseus: The Fall clocks in at 135 minutes, placing it firmly in feature-film territory. Koosha made the film over the course of three months, working part time, and it cost “mostly a small expense related to cloud token credits.”

“There are so very, very few who have access to the hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a movie through traditional means to tell a story as vast and difficult as one that does justice to the original Odyssey,” Rogers said.

That promise of democratization, however, is also fueling alarm among filmmakers who worry what artificial intelligence will mean for human cinematographers, writers, editors and actors. On July 6, news broke that AI actor Tilly Norwood will star in her own feature film, a comedy-drama called Misaligned. Norwood has become a high-profile symbol of AI’s role in the entertainment industry and been blasted by actors union SAG-AFTRA for “devaluing human artistry.”

Another AI-generated feature film by the studio, docudrama Dreams of Violets, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. It became the first fully AI-generated film screened as part of a major film festival.

To create Odysseus: The Fall, Fountain 0 used AI video model Kling tand then refined the imaging using proprietary video production software. That in-house tool “is what enables the film to rise to the level of human production,” said Pooya Koosha, producer of the film and co-founder of Fountain 0 with his brother Ash. Pooya’s likeness drives the character Eurylochus, who as second-in-command of Odysseus’ ship home, often undermined the king.

Whether Odysseus: The Fall the film achieves the level of promised quality will ultimately be up to viewers. With Nolan's The Odyssey landing in theaters first, audiences will soon have an unusual opportunity to compare two radically different interpretations of the same classic.