Wildwood at the end of the world (preview)

Every week, Lily or Emily write and publish a Friday newsletter about what's happening right now in pop culture. It's only for paid subscribers! Here's an excerpt from this week's piece, in which Emily writes about Wildwood, AI, and what it makes to make art by hand in an era of slop. If you want to read the rest, pick up a premium Episodes subscription using the button below!

On Friday, October 23, the Grok Imagine X account uploaded the purported first episode of a new series based on Homer's The Odyssey. This being a product of an Elon Musk-affiliated company in the year 2026, the video was, of course, entirely produced using AI tools by a company named Wonder Studios. It is, as these things go, probably the most technically accomplished piece of AI-generated filmmaking yet.

Now, before we damn this project with even the faintest of praise, let's at least nod to its origins as part of the backlash to Christopher Nolan's Odyssey adaptation, a backlash that was rooted primarily in the casting of Lupita Nyong'o, a Black woman, as Helen and Elliot Page, a trans man, in the small but pivotal role of Sinon. The backlash did not care that Nyong'o clears the sole bar for the casting of Helen in Homer's text — she's breathtakingly gorgeous — or that Page's work in the movie is really fucking good. All it cared about was that Nolan's Odyssey didn't square with the prejudices of the world's most loathsome assholes. So, no matter the "quality" of the above video, it's important to remember that it exists almost entirely to placate online bigots.

If you can leave all of that aside and try to view the Wonder Studios Odyssey with fresh eyes, its quality will become clear: I'd give it maybe a C. If I were feeling generous. Like, yes, you can tell that the LLM that generated the material has trained on a bunch of great films. The camera angles utilized are adequate, if unimaginative. The "performances" of the AI actors are stilted in a way even the worst human actor wouldn't be, but they're not so distracting as to make the thing unwatchable. It kind of looks pretty here and there, if completely generic.

Yet it is utterly lacking in artistic soul, in wit, in feeling. It is mostly a "Hey, look what I can do!" project, and while the early days of any new technological innovation in a medium are rife with "look what I can do!" showing off, there's usually at least an attempt to present something that could only have been captured in this fashion.

Yet since the initial impetus of the Wonder Studios Odyssey is and always will be the need to produce something that won't piss off people who subscribe to a hateful ideology, it lacks even a compelling reason to exist as a tech demo. In watching it, however, I felt a strange, cold certainty: Somewhere on the planet right now is someone who really will make something artistically valuable using generative AI, surely before I turn 60. They are probably, like, 12 right now, so they will have grown up with the tech in a way we adults will never understand. But they are going to make something for $20, and it's going to win some major prize, and I will realize I'm a dinosaur, clinging to modes of expression that are being eroded out from under me.

Or maybe I'm not. Because October 23 was also the day a different movie funded by a billionaire's largesse opened. That movie, too, exists at least in part as a beautiful demonstration of what a team of artisans is capable of, to the degree that just looking at it is highly pleasurable. It's called Wildwood, and it's one of the best films of the year.

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