In 2023, Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, announced that he was working on a documentary about Elon Musk. He asked Musk for an interview. The response was delivered on X: “Gibney,” Musk told his 241.5 million followers, “is an asshole.”
You could take the richest man in the world 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 Muskbrings the same monomaniacal energy to assassinating his subject’s character that Musk himself puts into building reusable rockets or self-driving cars. The extent of Gibney’s ambition is revealed early in the film: because Musk didn’t want to sit down for an interview, Gibney coos as the opening credits roll, the director decided to create an animated AI Elon and interview him instead.
In the hands of a filmmaker who was genuinely curious about his subject, this decision could have generated some real ideas, especially since Robo-Musk was only given lines that IRL Musk had said in public interviews. Instead, Gibney gives us a cartoonish Bond villain, sitting in a gaming chair and spewing decontextualized snippets intended 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 film’s poster shows Musk standing on top of 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.
Gn entert
