'Twilight of the Gods' Review: A Powerful Tribute of Norse Mythology

In the opening scene of Zack Snyder’s Twilight of the Gods, Leif Völsung (Stuart Martin) tells his men how he met his betrothed, Sigrid (Sylvia Hoeks). The animated series cuts to a kinetic depiction of the Norse king’s story. At the height of a battle on a wintry field, a warrior tears her way through an invading army and, with a feat of preternatural skill, saves Leif’s life. Before long, only the pair of newfound comrades remain standing, the snow beneath them marred by streaks of blood that resemble the scribbles of a giant.

Once the fighting concludes, Hans Zimmer’s spirited score turns to grim quiet, but that calm is cracked by a lightning bolt that heralds the arrival of a valkyrie, descended from the heavens to take the valiant dead to Valhalla. “As it left us, the valkyrie bowed,” Leif recalls. “To my Sigrid. And I knew love.” The tale is one of many recited over the course of Netflix’s romantic, brutal series, which evokes the historical and literary contours of Norse mythology to explore the power of storytelling on scales both intimate and world-devouring.

There’s a Norse myth in which Thor disguises himself as a bride before butchering the guests at a wedding, but in the first episode of Twilight of the Gods, when Thor (Pilou Asbæk) crashes a marriage ceremony, he forgoes pretense and skips right to the slaughter. His massacre sets Sigrid on a quest for revenge, a mission that sees her and Leif assemble a crew of outcasts: Egill (Rahul Kohli), a gallivanting spellcaster; Hervor (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), a bored, battle-hungry soldier; Andvari (Kristofer Hivju), an embittered blacksmith; a seer called the Seid-Kona (Jamie Clayton); and her companion, Ulfr (Peter Stormare), a half-feral man clad in a wolf pelt.

The cast imbues these endearingly odd characters with considerable personality, while the show’s writers lend the dialogue a poetic lilt and cadence—a winsome choice that honors Norse mythology’s roots in spoken verse. “Find quiet, or feel the back of my hand,” Leif says to Egill at one point, whetting the simple threat of a slap with alluring lyricism.

The gods—especially Loki (Paterson Joseph), who airs his own grievances against Asgard with sharp enunciation that turns every consonant into a dagger—speak with an even more formal, otherworldly sense of melody, no matter how crass, carnal, or vicious their words. King Tiwaz (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and his fellow Vanir—primeval, hidden deities—talk in deep, subtitled rumbles, using invented terms, like “helpmate” and “spit-sworn truth,” whose charmingly alien phrasing conveys the extent of their community’s seclusion.

The grace of the show’s language extends to its animation, which provides lucid, gruesome glimpses at the might of the gods and the near-superhuman determination of Sigrid and her allies. Snyder directs the first and last episodes, but his style pervades the entire series, which features a handful of dramatic slow-motion shots whose compositions brim with tense energy. One such visual, of a spear soaring toward its target, seems pulled straight out of 300. (Twilight of the Gods, though, proves less purposeful in its abundant sex scenes, as they attempt to provide Game of Thrones-esque sexposition and reveal the inner lives of participants but ultimately feel gratuitous.)

While Thor wages war, Odin (John Noble), the All-father, spends most of the season sequestered in his tower, wrestling with his knowledge of Ragnarök, the apocalyptic event from which the series takes its title. We learn that Odin fears the end times and the void that awaits him—a prescient dread, given how much of the Norse mythos may have been lost in the centuries that separated its oral origins and its eventual documentation in writing.

Twilight of the Gods contemplates that temporal gulf in an especially eccentric swing of a scene, where Odin experiences a vision in which he, hanging from a tree, looks up to see Jesus nailed to the cross, as though gazing into a warped mirror. The image embodies the haziness of the historical record and the possibility that Christ retroactively informed the symbolism of Odin when the latter’s ancient legends were finally put to paper.

The sagas of Sigrid and her allies similarly hint at the mutability of chronology and culture. As the heroes share with each other their stories of resistance against gendered oppression and sexual prosecution, of struggles with loyalty, inescapable sins, and regrets, their woes feel simultaneously timely and primordial. When Leif reflects on the nature of the valkyrie he saw on the day he met Sigrid, he might as well be describing humanity, history, and Twilight of the Gods itself: “Beautiful it was,” he says, “but monstrous.”