Review by Andrew Swafford
What if you took the magic out of The Odyssey? That’s what Umberto Pasolini seems to be doing in The Return, and it’s blandly synonymous title should be evidence enough that the answer is: boring.
While the incredible Ralph Fiennes makes for a decent jacked-old-man Odysseus, this story gives him almost nothing to do. The Return starts the end of the usual Odyssey story, with Odysseus setting foot on his homeland for the first time in decades. But the phantasmagorical island hopping sequences leading up to that are what makes The Odyssey a story worth adapting for the screen in the first place. Gone is the Cyclops’s fiery cave, the sinister siren’s song, and and the mystical palace of Calypso — the world of The Return is the beige of flat Athenian stone.
I teach The Odyssey (in graphic novel form) to high school freshmen fairly often, and they always have a lot of fun with it. Aside from the book’s amazing catalogue of cool mythological gods and monsters, students always enjoy debating the supposed heroism of Odysseus: is he a war hero and great tactician who protects his men and defends his wife, or is he an adulterer and a hypocrite who is often needlessly violent? Unfortunately, The Return doesn’t seem all that interested in asking this question, presenting Odysseus as a more-or-less straightforwardly heroic figure rather than a specter of a heroic ideal renowned in a bygone era.
With no monsters and no moral ambiguity, The Return saps The Odyssey of its most fascinating elements and somehow stretches a small portion of the text into a solid two hours. I didn’t think it was possible to make an Odyssey adaptation this boring, but The Return found a way.