Zack Snyder’s Norse Mythology Cartoon

Whatever else you might think of Zack Snyder as a storyteller, he’s always had a knack for crafting striking imagery, and that holds true in his latest effort, Netflix’s Twilight of the Gods. Stone Quarry Animation casts the Norse mythology retelling in vibrant colors and elegant, expressive lines that turn into awesome monsters towering over scenic vistas, or enormous battlefields punctuated by bursts of lightning, explosions of gore and slow-motion leaps through the air.

As a work simply to be looked at, it’s a thing of beauty. Alas, as one to get emotionally invested in, it’s rather more lacking. The saga is chock-full of larger-than-life characters who seem plenty interesting, but short on the patience it’d take to actually get to know them. As a result, it rings hollow, even as its heroes and villains go about the weighty business of reshaping the universe.

At the center of the story, co-created by Snyder, Jay Oliva and Eric Carrasco, is Sigrid (voiced by Sylvia Hoeks), a fierce warrior who once won the heart of an equally formidable king, Leif (Stuart Martin), by saving his life in battle. But when the storm god Thor (Pilou Asbaek) pays an unexpected and unwelcome visit, what should have been a peaceful wedding is turned into a horrific bloodbath. Sigrid comes out the other side alive, but with a burning desire for vengeance. Taking to heart the motto of her late clan — “We fear no gods!” — she sets out to do nothing less than murder Thor himself.

Twilight of the Gods’ leads are men and women of action, and at eight chapters of less than 30 minutes each, their tale moves practically at a sprint. No sooner has Sigrid announced she misses her homeland than she and Leif are galloping off for a visit, and no sooner has she determined that she needs god-killing weapons than she’s secured them from the dwarf smith Andvari (Kristofer Hivju). Near the start of the second episode, she announces her plan to recruit five very special followers for her likely suicidal mission. It drains some of the suspense when it takes her all of 15 minutes to find them.

The gang speeds ahead from there, pulling us from one dramatic sight to another. Over the season, Sigrid journeys to the underworld and back; floats down a river choked with the spirits of unjustly drowned women; charges into the grand gold halls of giants and gods. She and her people encounter hissing armies of the dead and statuesque winged Valkyries and beasts as tall as mountains.

Nearly every installment culminates in at least one brutal, magic-laced conflict, and like its fellow TV-MA Netflix adventure Blue-Eye Samurai, Twilight of the Gods does not pull its punches in the violence department. Fighters slice people in half, crush skulls with their bare hands, hammer their way through bodies like they’re splitting open piñatas. They also tend to be a sexually frank bunch, casual about nudity and unashamed of their carnal urges. But though the series is plenty explicit, its sex scenes have a self-conscious edge that land them closer to awkward than steamy. A guy randomly blurting out his backstory in the middle of a threesome feels like the work of a show trying to remind you how grown-up it is, not of one that feels comfortable in its own sensuality.

Or perhaps it reflects a show uncertain that it can carry an audience’s attention without boobs or blood. The irony is that Twilight of the Gods is most compelling when it stops long enough to let its characters think and feel, not just act. A plotline that sends Leif and Loki reliving their most painful memories adds a layer of tragedy to the latter, as he bitterly (and not incorrectly) remarks that he exists only to be blamed. Leif’s wholehearted but clear-eyed devotion to Sigrid becomes our most sensitive barometer for understanding what this mission is doing to her soul. An unexpected flirtation between the Seid-Kona (Jamie Clayton), a feared witch, and Egill (Rahul Kohli), Leif’s charismatic slave, becomes a welcome spot of sweetness in a tale that otherwise prioritizes anger and anguish.

But none of these more intimate throughlines are given the room to grow into their fullest potential. Often, the series resorts to simply telling us how the characters feel, instead of waiting for them to show us. Thor falls into an odd romance with the goddess of defeat, Sandraudiga (a creepily alluring Jessica Henwick), but we barely have a chance to wonder what that’s about before two other characters have an entire conversation spelling out his motives. The hearts and souls and psyches of these characters are treated as footnotes to the epic clashes between them, rather than as the only reasons we have to care what happens to this whole fictional lot in the first place.

Though Twilight of the Gods is in constant motion, it never manages to get anywhere terribly interesting. The season finale is built around the war these characters have been building up to since day one, and it pulls out all the stops. The fights are a relentless cacophony of sound and fury, cut together faster than it’s possible for the human brain (or at least my human brain) to process. Some of the boldest imagery yet appears in the visions that Odin (John Noble) sees of the very distant future, including an appearance by one god that made me mouth, “What the fuck?” alone in my living room.

Yet after a while, I realized I was no longer totally following what was happening, in large part because I’d stopped caring enough to make the effort. Sigrid refusing to bow to the gods is one thing. Her show failing to properly heed her emotions, or her friends’ — now, that’s the true kiss of death.