The first press screening of Alex Gibney's four-hour Elon Musk documentary at the Venice Film Festival drew a packed audience, but also audible snores from one critic, according to a first-hand account by Tori Brazier, Senior Film & Entertainment Reporter for Metro.
The documentary, titled Musk, runs three hours and 55 minutes including a 10-minute interval. It screened at 7:30pm in the Sala Perla, a theatre with just under 600 seats, a week into the 83rd edition of the festival. The premiere later earned a five-minute standing ovation in the thousand-seater Sala Grande on Wednesday.
A journalist's marathon viewing
Brazier, who attended the screening, described being drawn in by morbid curiosity despite an overbooked schedule that included an 8:30am screening the next morning. She willingly gave up a rare relaxed hot meal to attend. The queue for the Sala Perla was busy, and many journalists were making aggressive beelines for end-of-row seats, likely to facilitate mid-documentary exits with minimal disruption.
A critic who sat next to Brazier politely warned that he would have to leave at a certain point. He expressed horror at the four-hour runtime, saying 'Four hours is too long!' and 'Don't remind me!' of their workloads. His gentle snores punctuated much of the screening, a hazard of the job into the second week of Venice. He ended up staying beyond Brazier, who tapped out after an hour and 50 minutes, just before the origin chapter and the intermission.
AI Musk and documentary's core question
Musk declined to be interviewed by Gibney, denouncing the documentary as a 'hot piece' made by a 'douche'. Instead, an AI version of Musk is used, clothed in a leather jacket and placed in a video game set-up, in homage to Musk's belief that we're all living in a simulation. The documentary teases all his personas over the years like skins in a video game, such as engineer, movie star, playboy, seer, and 'Kublai Khan'.
The core question at the heart of Gibney's film is how Musk has assumed so much power and why we have given it to him. Brazier found the portrait far more compelling than she was prepared for. The documentary also presents Musk as an 'egregiously' self-promoting failed CEO with an ego problem. Critic James Mottram predicted that if 'nuke' Musk sees the film, as influencer and Musk baby mama Ashley St. Clair describes him, he 'probably will explode'.
Praise and release details
Not all is negative. The documentary includes praise from former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who estimates Musk saved the US government around $30 billion and likens him to a fellow WW1 soldier in the trenches, trying to get space exploration reinvigorated. Interestingly, Musk has yet to slam Gibney's film like Trump did following the premiere of Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice at Cannes in 2024, which starred Sebastian Stan as a younger Trump.
Brazier noted that Musk mocked the runtime last month, asking if Gibney was 'trying to bore people to death'. She was disappointed to leave when she did, having held on pretty far after the hour she initially planned to watch, drawn back in by chapters on lawsuits against Tesla's self-driving claims, his 'alpha' identity, and the 'breeder' woman supplying him with his legion of children, thought to be many more than the 14 who are public knowledge. She concluded that the businessman and wealthiest person in the world has proven to be a gripping subject. Musk is scheduled for release in North American cinemas on October 16, before streaming on HBO internationally.
