But this isn't a summer blockbuster. It's Elon Musk's latest Big Idea. In addition to building electric vehicles, launching rockets, and colonizing Mars, Musk wants to reinvent tunneling and destroy soul-sucking traffic.

Just how Musk's latest venture, the wonderfully named Boring Company, will do that remains rather opaque, perhaps even to Musk himself. "We're just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent," he said in February, with the nonchalance of someone ordering a latte. "We have no idea what we're doing—I want to be clear about that."

"We have no idea what we're doing" are not words that reassure city planners, let alone the folks elected to represent the people of Hawthorne. That's the Los Angeles suburb where SpaceX—Musk's space venture—is located, and the home of the Boring Company's first big dig.