The Return (2024): An Angry Review

I don’t usually write movie reviews, but I am a longtime fan of Homer’s Odyssey and this movie made me mad enough to write one.

I finally got around to watching The Return with Ralph Fiennes last night. Here is my review:

Look how they massacred my boy. Terrible adaptation. 0 out of 5 stars. Absolute travesty on the order of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Barely even recognizable as the Odyssey. Let’s go point by point. Some spoilers ahead, but you don’t need to see it anyway so it doesn’t matter.

1. Odysseus in the book after he got home was a cunning strategist, singleminded in his focus on retaking his throne and biding his time until the right moment. This movie makes him into a brooding, conflicted sad sack who gets to Ithaca by accident via shipwreck, doesn’t even know if he wants to become king again, has to be henpecked and badgered into it by Penelope, Telemachus, and Eumaeus. Similar to what the LotR movies did to Aragorn but multiplied by the number of ships that Helen’s face launched.

2. Among many stupid changes to the plot, the most egregious was that Laertes dies of old age shortly after Odysseus gets back to Ithaca. He’s buried, but Penelope keeps up her charade of weaving his burial shroud during the day and undoing it at night, which makes zero sense because HE’S ALREADY IN THE GROUND.

3. Penelope way too overtly knows the beggar is Odysseus. In the book it was ambiguous whether she knew before he revealed himself. This might be a product of the movie taking out the supernatural disguise element and not mentioning Athena at all, which makes it a little less believable that Penelope wouldn’t recognize her husband. Chalk it up to modern materialistic nonsense.

4. Silliness between Penelope and Antinous throughout. They’re alone in a room together at a couple points, which I’m pretty sure never would have happened and definitely never happened in the book. She pleads for his life at the end after the rest of the suitors are killed. He’s supposed to be “not like the other suitors” or something I guess.

5. Antinous just sits there like a tard while the rest of the suitors are killed, then offers himself up for Telemachus to kill without resistance. He’s also a massive simp for Penelope, which I guess is fine for one of the suitors, but in the end I got the sense that the movie wanted me to feel bad for him when he’s killed. Why? He got what was coming to him, just like the rest of those snake bastards.

6. Multiple instances of, “You sure you don’t want to do that take again? No? We’re using that one? Whatever you say I guess.”

7. Multiracial casting. Not much more to say, every movie does this now, we expect it. Doesn’t make it any less stupid.

8. No plan on Odysseus’ part when he goes to kill the suitors. In the book he had Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius all in on the plan and ready to play their parts. Here he was flying by the seat of his pants, which the real Odysseus would never do. #notmyodysseus

9. One minor positive point I’ll give the movie: it gave a pretty believable portrayal of how the shooting through the ax heads and killing of the suitors might have gone down. Maybe that bumps it up to half a star out of 5.

10. Didn’t need to see Ralph Fiennes’ dong. I changed my mind, back to 0 stars out of 5.

I could say more, but if God was satisfied with only 10 commandments I think I can be satisfied with 10 points. I’m glad I watched this movie in the same way I’m glad I watched Napoleon, which is that now I can have fun hating on it and tell all my friends not to waste their time.

One objection I’ve gotten so far to this opinion:

For me it wasn’t “the Odyssey” but “directors story about PTSD wrapped up in the Odyssey”, and in that I thought the movie did a decent job. Some will hate that idea, some won’t, but judging the film based on its faithfulness to the text misses what the directors were going for IMO.

Of course there are way more things wrong with it beyond just being unfaithful to the source material. For example, even if the director just wanted to do his own thing, the change made in point 2 above makes a pretty important piece of the story incoherent.

Besides that, I have a huge problem with movies that claim to be adapted from source material but are really completely different stories wrapped in the source material's packaging. It makes the packaging a lie. This movie isn't the Odyssey because "Odysseus" is missing the primary characteristic that makes him Odysseus. If you want to tell a different story from the Odyssey, why package it as the Odyssey? Why not just tell your own story?

We know the answer. It’s one of two reasons:

1. Your story isn’t good and you know it won’t sell if it’s not wrapped in recognizable packaging that people can get excited about.

2. Your story is meant to subvert and demoralize by degrading a foundational hero of our culture. Think Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, or any number of other franchise movies in the past decade that have replaced decisive, competent action hero protagonists from previous entries with brooding sad sacks who can’t do anything without a woman’s help. That’s what they did to Odysseus here.

Just read the Odyssey, folks.

Now I’ve typed the word Odyssey too many times and it’s starting to look funny to my eyes.