Thor: Tales of Asgard (2011) Netflix

More like Thor: Tales of Shit, am I right?

Rating: 1 out of 5 Characters Who Talks With an Appropriate Voice

Plot Synopsis: Young Thor is a terrible person.  He's followed by Loki who is almost entirely one dimensional.  They follow the Warriors Three who are cowardly liars and tell Sif she isn't man enough to matter.  Nothing happens and nobody cares.

The Good:

-The opening credits are nice, good music a nice olde tyme feel.

-There have been moments of humor, Thor revealing himself to the Warriors Three, Loki handing Thor a wooden mallet, Sif shooting a practice dummy in the crotch and Loki enjoying the cold on Jotunheim.  There are a couple of moments but they don’t really add up to an enjoyable experience and aren't worth sitting through the rest of this drivel.

-While I’m not a huge fan of the style it is competently animated, lips sync up, there isn't a whole lot of awkward animation or dropped frames.  It’s crisp, it’s clean, it’s competent even if I don’t like every line drawn.

-The climax isn't half bad.  It doesn’t make the rest of the movie worth it at all but it’s pretty decent.

The Bad:

-Odin has two eyes.  What the hell?  In the classic mythology he lost his eye before creating all the other gods, in the movie he lost the eye to Laufey when he fought Jotunheim.  Which was around the time Thor was born.  Where does this movie fit in?  Does it slot into the comics?  I’m not an expert on the comics but I’m pretty sure Odin only ever had the one eye.

-Thor is a punk ass bitch.  He is immediately unlikable.  He’s cocky and a crappy fighter and if his arc is to not be those things by the end of the movie then what’s the point of Marvel live action movie?  He has no choice but to end being the exact same as when he started to keep continuity with the movie.

-Amora the Enchantress is trying to seduce, like, a 14 year old Loki.

-They show this Asgard as the movie Asgard but then take no other aspect from the movies, I ask again, what’s the point of this animated feature?  Where does it fit in?  What it’s purpose?

-The Warrior’s Three are punk ass bitches.  They are liars and cowards and braggarts.  There's nothing there to get behind and support.  I don't want to be any of these characters, where's my escapism?  I can't relate to any of these characters either.

-Odin asks to be told he’s a good father.  He’s a punk ass bitch.  He doesn't ask IF he's a good father, just that someone needs to TELL him he's a good father.

-How the fuck does a wooden mallet cut through a rope?

-The first two action scenes are pretty flaccid.

-This is just so boring.  So far there’s nothing here that invests me into what’s going on.  The characters aren’t interesting, they’re mostly one note and unlikable, the continuity is confusing, the plot is vague and the animation, when it comes to action, just doesn’t hold up.

-GAH! WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS!

-There’s a nice bath scene with the Valkyries, you know, for all the kids watching.

-43 minutes in and this thing has totally failed to hook me so I’m completely uninterested in what’s going on.

-How did they get to the Valkyries from Jutonheim?  How are they going back to Jutonheim from the Valkyries?  How are they getting to Asgard from any of these places?

-Whole bunch of dudes died and I don’t care.

-Odin loses his eye to a fire blast from the sudden antagonist who wasn’t that sudden because he was clearly evil from the start.

-Wait, Odin got his eye back.

-Now it’s gone again.

The Ugly:

-We open on Thor in a red Marty McFly vest and a skirt.  I don’t mind the skirt, a lot of bad-asses wear skirts (Sean Connery, Duncan McCleod, Rowdy Roddy Piper) but the vest kills it for me.

-Not a fan of the animation style.  Sif looks good, the environment looks good but Thor has these big elephant feet.  It’s close to being good animation but juuuuuust off a bit.

-The voices of Thor, Loki and Sif are a bit off.

-Fandral looks terrible, like someone spilled mustard on his cell.

Final Thoughts:  When I think Marvel animated movies I think of shit.  Marvel has always been the place to go if you want good live action movies and DC is where you go for superior animated movies.  That’s just how it worked out for a very long time, until DC upped their movie game since the Nolan Batrilogy.  But this pretty much exemplifies the difference between the two.  There’s “action” but it’s the kind of “action” you are forced to put in quotation marks.  Like when there’s a “fight” at school when really it was two bro’s shoving each other for a minute before the teacher broke it up.  Technically, yes, something happened but really nothing happened.  That’s pretty much every action scene.  The characterization is non-existent, I would be taxed to tell you how each character is different from the other and what little character growth exists is a non-factor.  Every character ends the movies basically as it began except Loki who’s a little darker for the experience.  But in every aspect that this movie fails your typical DC animated movie excels (characterization, action, story).

            I find it very hard to care about this movie in even the slightest.  I’ve just finished it and already every plot detail runs out of my head like… something that runs fast.  See what this movie did to me?  It made me demonstrably stupider!  This move comes in like a lamb and then it lost me, I hung in there for about thirty minutes but between minute thirty and minute forty five I completely lost all interest in what was going on and after that it doesn’t really matter how good the rest of it is.  I wanted to turn it off by minute forty five and I might as well have stopped for how much of it stuck with me.  Once I lose interest it’s really hard to pull me back in and this movie just didn’t have that in it.  It’s a waste of time, just ignore it, pretend it never existed.  You’ll be better off for it.