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A four-hour screening is a tough sell, although this year’s Venice Film Festival isn’t shying away from marathon movies.
We’ve got both Alex Gibney’s Musk and Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci effort, Joie de Vivre (although that’s being split into two parts – cowards).
The Elon Musk documentary runs at three hours and 55 minutes, including a 10-minute interval. But a week into the 83rd edition of the festival, this monster documentary’s first press screening didn’t start until 7.30pm.
That means if you stay through to the end, you’ll be hitting the queue for the vaporettos back to Venice proper from the festival complex on the nearby Lido close to midnight.
I’m drawn in by morbid curiosity as my schedule is already overbooked with films and press conferences, plus I have an 8.30am screening the next morning at the start of a busy day.
I know I can’t stay for the whole thing because I’ve already burnt the candle far too much at both ends. But I still willingly gave up the opportunity to have one of the very few relaxed, high-quality hot meals I’ve had so far.
SpaceX founder and X owner Musk has declined to be interviewed by Gibney for the documentary, which he denounces as a ‘hot piece’ made by a ‘douche’ – so an AI version of Musk is used, clothed in a leather jacket I’m sure Musk himself would think was pretty fly, and placed in a video game set-up in homage to Musk’s belief that we’re all living in a simulation.
I join a very busy queue to the Sala Perla – not the largest theatre at the Biennale, sorry Elon, at just under 600 seats – but it’s still a packed audience (and the film later gets a five-minute standing ovation in the thousand-seater Sala Grande at its premiere on Wednesday).
Plenty of journalists appear to be making beelines more aggressively than usual for the end of row seats, potentially to aid a mid-doc dash like me, exiting with minimal disruption.
I beat one press member for my seat, while a critic who then sits next to me later politely warns that ‘at a certain point, I will have to leave’. I reassure him that’s my plan too, as he adds in horror, ‘Four hours is too long!’ and ‘Don’t remind me!’ of the workloads still lurking for us.
Later, his gentle snores will punctuate much of the Musk screening (a hazard of the job into the second week of Venice). He also ends up staying beyond me, when I tap out after an hour and 50 minutes, just before the origin chapter and the 10-minute intermission.
I’m sure Musk will be secretly pleased to know how much of our time we’ve dedicated to this documentary, even if he mocked the run-time last month, asking if Oscar-winning filmmaker Gibney was ‘trying to bore people to death’.
He’d also surely be just the teensiest bit flattered that I was in fact disappointed to leave when I did.
I held on pretty far after the hour I initially planned to watch, getting 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… but I know my limits.
How has Musk assumed so much power, and why have we given it to him, is the question at the heart of Gibney’s documentary, which made for a far more compelling portrait than I was prepared for.
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’. World’s first trillionaire clearly came too late into the editing process, after he held the title in June for 12 days.
Yes, the documentary does also present him as an ‘egregiously’ self-promoting failed CEO with an ego problem.
Critic James Mottram predicts that if ‘nuke’ Musk sees this film, as influencer and Musk baby mama Ashley St. Clair describes him, he ‘probably will explode’.
But it’s not all bad. There’s even some praise included from former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who estimates Musk saved the US government around $30billion and likens him to a fellow WW1 soldier in the trenches, trying to get space exploration reinvigorated.
Surprisingly, Musk is 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 version of him. We can only assume it’s imminent as he starts to read reviews (because of course he will).
I also know that I want to watch Musk until the end, so 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.
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