Are You Ready for This Four Hour Documentary on Elon Musk?

I’ve often heard it said that films are too long these days. Who enjoys being stuck in a cinema for three-plus hours? Me. I’m that person. I want more long films. Give me Lawrence of Arabia on a loop, dang it! But even I balked at the news of Musk, the latest documentary from Oscar winner Alex Gibney about that guy who gave Twitter a stupid new name and decided to usher in the fourth Reich because nobody laughed at his jokes. How long is this movie, you ask? It’s 225 minutes long.

Musk just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and Elon ain’t too happy. It claims to be a “definitive and unvarnished examination” of the troll, which may explain its length. Musk think’s it’s a “hit-piece”, but he also thinks that woke is the reason most of his kids don’t speak to him. Gibney knows a thing or two about taking on scammers and high-level fraud. This is the dude who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and films on Lance Armstrong and Elizabeth Holmes. But even he was trepidatious about taking on Elon.

“There was a tremendous sense of fear of talking, really almost existential fear, both among people who were his critics, people who were his business colleagues and people who are his friends,” he said at the festival conference for the film. “I talked to you know many, many, many, many people who, except for some of the brave people here with me here, declined to speak.”

One person who is speaking is Ashley St. Clair, a former right-wing mouth-piece and the mother of one of Musk’s kids. Since her change of heart, she’s been vocal in calling out both Musk’s cruelty and the overall hypocrisies and machinations of the hard-right outrage machine. She says she turned down a $40 million offer from Musk to decline Gibney’s offer to participate in the film.

It would be amazing if this film revealed something new and incriminating about this creep but I am sceptical. Besides, we already know so much about Musk and it hasn’t made him any less powerful or dangerous. But it has annoyed him, which is something! He desperately wants to be cool and it’ll just never happen.

Musk is scheduled to be released theatrically in the United States by Bleecker Street on October 16th.