Alex Gibney’s four-hour Elon Musk doc is - as one would expect from an Academy Award-winning documentarian - a handsomely produced and well-constructed survey of the tech giant and political menace.
The problem is that the only people likely to want to see a doc like this are people like me - people who are already hyper-aware of all of the dangers that Musk poses - the kind of people who read long-form exposes in The Atlantic and The New Yorker and who listen to podcasts by Kara Swisher - the kind of people who already suspect Musk is a misogynistic racist psychopath but want to know the truth behind his drug use and the extent of his paternity.
And for these people there’s literally not one new revelation in this entire documentary. We don’t actually get to the bottom of his drug use. We don’t actually find out how many kids Musk has. We don’t know what he meant when he said he knew the election result hours before anyone else with a high degree of confidence. Because while Alex Gibney has brilliantly marshalled all the “known knowns” and put them in one handy place, he hasn’t actually contributed any new knows.
So we are left in the uncomfortable position that the people who probably need to be brought up to speed on this topic are going to be put off by the film’s running time. And those that will be drawn to it, and are willing to commit the time, will be disappointed.
MUSK has a running time of 3 hrs 52 mins. It played Venice and Toronto and opens in the USA on October 16th.
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