From looking at the other reviews, it seems like a lot of people saw this as children and fell in love with it, and are still looking at it through that lens. Well, I read the comics as a kid and loved them, and still love them as an adult, but having just seen the movie I was really disappointed. This movie has barely any plot to it (whetever plot there is could have been told in about 15 minutes) and it spends a lot of time on ultimately meaningless fooling around. Now, you can expect a few dancing and singing scenes and playing around in an animation, but if that's what the bulk of the movie consists of and nothing really happens, then it's ultimately very uninteresting, I have to say. Very little of the wit and the nicely-packed adventures of the original comics are to be found here--if they'd just decided to pick one of the earlier albums and dramatise that, this would've been much interesting. It really doesn't help that they decided to include the Quark, who is mostly an incredibly annoying little git who makes everyone's life miserable, yet we are somehow supposed to feel sympathy for him. And unfortunately, the Quark's story is the only really character-oriented bit in the movie. Parts of the movie illustrate the old Norse myths wonderfully and the backgrounds are beautifully painted, but overall there's just not that much meat to it. In a movie about Norse myths, I would've enjoyed seeing more mythical adventures instead of 20-minute sequences of kids building tree houses and clapping their hands, or endless excruciatingly frustrating sequences of the Quark breaking stuff and being annoying. I would've wanted to see more of Thor, Loki and Odin because the nature of the gods was pretty close to what it was in the myths and the comics, but instead I just got a baby troll whose neck I wanted to wring. I'm really surprised that such witty and entertaining comics (with fun and exciting versions of the old myths) could result in such a frustrating and boring movie. It's a great shame, because there was certainly a lot of potential.
Review of Valhalla
