This review is based on a screening from the Venice Film Festival. Musk will be released in theaters on October 16.
I like a long movie. Give me five hours of Russian journalists talking and I’ll gladly take six more, but if someone balks at the idea of spending 225 minutes (plus intermission) with Elon Musk — one of the world’s most off-putting celebrities — I couldn’t blame them. Directed by Alex Gibney, the documentary Musk is a wide-spanning exposé of things already known about the South African business magnate, who casts a long shadow on American politics. The film is certainly watchable; Gibney is a pop filmmaker after all, and this would make for great distraction when viewed in several parts, after scrolling through your streaming service of choice.
If you’re aware enough of global power players (or really, just online enough), then little in Musk will surprise you. However, the effects of seeing this much about the man laid end-to-end can be quite unsettling. So, Gibney and editor Michael J. Palmer deserve kudos for assembling a documentary epic that is — despite its lack of novelty — never boring. Although it eventually takes its subject to task over his troubling views and ventures, the film is surprisingly balanced, and gives Elon his flowers for achievements in electric cars and space exploration, up to a point. This helps answer a question Gibney poses in the opening minutes, about how so many people could become ensnared by his cult of personality, especially for someone with the charisma of a damp towel.
Elon himself declined to be interviewed; in fact, an early moment depicts a Twitter exchange where he turns Gibney down, but the director is not deterred. To retain his subject’s presence in a thematically fitting way — given Elon’s involvement in A.I. and his proclivity for wondering if we live in a simulation — Gibney’s team creates a hand-crafted digital avatar of the SpaceX CEO, with all the uncanny ugliness of an A.I. generated monstrosity (even though it isn’t one). This digital golem, who appears as though Musk had entered an arcade game and got trapped there, speaks lines from a database of everything the man has ever publicly said.
This flourish is not dissimilar to Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, which builds digital representations of interviewees who believe they’re living in a computer — only in Musk, Gibney spends far less time on this and other individual conspiracies. Beginning with Elon’s early successes (as an investor, rather than an inventor), the film makes clear how he usurps companies before claiming them as his own, often stripping them for parts. Its initial hour is surprisingly nuanced for a figure either reviled or worshipped, with a fair amount of paternal backstory that explains at least some things about him. However, it soon gets into the weeds of why Elon is so downright weird, by way of interviews with several exes, and women with whom he’s fathered children.
Gibney is usually adept at deconstructing both famous figures and fanaticism. His works like Going Clear and The Inventor get to the root of how Scientology leaders and Silicon Valley swindler Elizabeth Holmes could ensnare so many, while his other film from this year, the Sundance premiere Knife, carefully peels back the zealotry that led to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Each of these films is incredibly accessible. Although the same is technically true of Musk — which treads subject matter similar to all three — it doesn’t feel nearly as exacting or comprehensive, despite its nearly four-hour runtime.
Chapter by chapter, the movie re-constructs Elon’s journey en route to billions in his pocket, dozens dead from self-driving automobile incidents, and eventually, a seat at the table next to U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom we see him cut hundreds of thousands of government jobs. Numerous interviews with loved ones, former colleagues and tech reporters stand-in adequately for the lack of Elon himself, whose digital avatar doesn’t add all that much beyond peripheral texture, despite being central to the movie.
It’s also unfortunate to see the movie flail when Gibney tries to re-create video game aesthetics in order to heighten and cheekily dramatize major decisions in Elon’s life. These go on a little too long and don’t have much modulation, which holds the movie back from being too provocative or subversive.
Gibney is highly aware of the radioactive personality at the center of his film, so there’s enough by way of absurd humor to counteract the unpleasantness. However, as a tale of one of the architects of our modern world, the movie’s emotional and intellectual foundation is seldom sturdy enough to stand on its own. It tends to lean on existing footage (Elon’s cameos on The Simpsons and in Iron Man 2; segments about him by comedian John Oliver and streamer Hasan Piker) to detail conflicting or evolving views in a punchy manner. It’s by no means a bad thing to pull from various sources, but each of these makes it clear that the story of Elon Musk has been told more coherently and more completely elsewhere.
Much like Elon himself, Gibney simply re-assembles existing ideas into something marketable — even though selling people on four hours on someone who comes across as a vapid, awkward huckster (with a white supremacist streak) is an uphill battle. Rare are the moments where Musk digs deep into the issues it broaches, remaining content to weave a fabric about how Elon is perceived, and will be perceived for years to come, without getting to the cultural or psychological root of why. It’s painfully ironic that Gibney’s wide-spanning documentary is unlikely to contribute to the man’s legacy in meaningful ways.
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