Odysseus as Shattered Veteran

The Return Is a Totally Reworked Version of the Odyssey, but One That Keeps Us Stuck in the Anti-Heroic “Prestige Cinema” of the Last Thirty Years

Around the Fire

In an early scene in The Return, the new film based on the Odyssey, the loyal swineherd Eumaeus and several young men of Ithaca gather around his hut’s fire, and begin to question the exhausted stranger who has washed-up on their shores. We know it is Odysseus but they do not—he just tells them he is an old soldier who fought at Troy. The…