In 2023, Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, announced that he was working on a documentary about Elon Musk. He asked Musk for an interview. The answer was delivered on X: \u201cGibney,\u201d Musk informed his 241.5 million followers, \u201cis a douche.\u201d<\/p>\n
You could take the world\u2019s richest man at his word. Or you could spend three hours and 55 minutes watching Gibney do his best to prove Musk right.<\/p>\n
The director\u2019s new film, released Friday and simply titled Musk, brings the same monomaniacal energy to assassinating its subject\u2019s character that Musk himself brings to building reusable rockets or self-driving cars. The scope of Gibney\u2019s ambition is revealed early on in the film: Because Musk wouldn\u2019t sit down for an interview, Gibney coos as the opening credits roll, the director decided to create an animated AI Elon and interview it instead.<\/p>\n
In the hands of a filmmaker actually curious about his subject, this decision might\u2019ve generated some genuine insights, especially as Robo-Musk was only fed lines that IRL Musk had spoken in public interviews. Instead, Gibney gives us a cartoonish Bond villain, sitting on a gaming chair and spitting out decontextualized snippets meant to support the film\u2019s not-so-subtle thesis: Unless we somehow stop him, Elon Musk will destroy the world.<\/p>\n
Gibney seems to mean it literally: The movie\u2019s poster shows Musk standing atop the globe, having cut it in half with a chainsaw, and the film itself begins with a poorly animated sequence showing the earth exploding in slow motion.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s just the first five minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2023, Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, announced that he was working on a documentary about Elon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-797519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}