Review: Musk — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Musk

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 3 hours 52 minutes

Director: Alex Gibney

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

There’s no question master documentarian Alex Gibney approached his mammoth film Musk with a point of view: that the owner of Tesla, X, and SpaceX is a man so rich he is accountable to no one.

Whether you’re an Elon fan or not, after nearly four hours of granular examination under Gibney’s microscope – including interviews with two mothers of Musk’s children, his father, and longtime business associates – it’s hard to walk away with any other conclusion. The disagreement will come as to whether Musk is using his unprecedented power for good or evil.

Musk refused to participate in the project, dismissing a query from the Oscar-winning Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) with a tweeted profanity. Happily for Gibney, Musk is the kind of guy who goes on the record just about every single day, so there was no shortage of speeches, interviews, tweets, and offhand comments for him to choose from.

Longtime readers of this space may remember that I have little patience for extra-long movies: If I ever write another book about film, I’m going to call it Tell It in Two Hours. To my mind, a filmmaker must earn every single second beyond the 120-minute mark, and few of them do. For the most part, aside from some overlong – and kind of distasteful – interludes that envision Musk’s DOGE force as first-person video game shooters gunning down thousands of government employees, Gibney justifies the film’s length. His interview subjects have a lot to say about the man, and Musk’s life story is a long and winding road of successes that swing between visionary and plain dumb luck.

Musk has brushed off Musk as “a hit piece,” and he has a point in that Gibney doesn’t even try to soften his narrative – unless you count the implication that he’s the product of an apparently hideous South African childhood, marked by brutal bullying at both home and school. Still, there are passages where Gibney allows glimpses of the early, boyish Musk – the wonderboy who, it now seems impossible to believe, was the darling of liberals and conservatives alike. It’s not until Musk encounters some perceived snubs by the Biden administration that he throws all-in with the Right, and then, in Gibney’s telling, embraces every anti-Left trope in sight with the ferocity of a Spotted Hyena.

Did Musk really, with cold-hearted calculation, promote his cars as completely autonomous knowing it would lead to what he considered an acceptable level of fatalities? Is he really plotting to control elections through his Starlink satellite network? Was his entire DOGE enterprise aimed at rooting out government investigators who had set their sights on him and his companies? Gibney seems to think so (and Musk is threatening to sue him over some of his darker conclusions). The director applies the questionable device of having an AI version of Musk defend himself, its computerized voice and diabolically animated face pleading Musk’s stated belief that he is just the man the world needs right now.

But the film’s closing shot – of that animated Musk rocketing away toward a future life on Mars while Planet Earth explodes behind him – has the final, cautionary word: Any time you give one person too much control over too much of your life, that life is increasingly going to be enslaved to their singular, not necessarily benevolent, vision.