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: “Gibney,” Musk informed his 241.5 million followers, “is a douche.”
You could take the world’s richest man at his word. Or you could spend three hours and 55 minutes watching Gibney do his best to prove Musk right.
The director’s new film, released Friday and simply titled Musk, brings the same monomaniacal energy to assassinating its subject’s character that Musk himself brings to building reusable rockets or self-driving cars. The scope of Gibney’s ambition is revealed early on in the film: Because Musk wouldn’t 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.
In the hands of a filmmaker actually curious about his subject, this decision might’ve 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’s not-so-subtle thesis: Unless we somehow stop him, Elon Musk will destroy the world.
Gibney seems to mean it literally: The movie’s 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.
And that’s just the first five minutes.
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