Death Note Review

No potato chip scene! 0/5!


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Hey, did you like the manga or anime adaptation of Death Note? Well, imagine a much dumber version of that here!

Adaptations are always tricky beasts, but it seems like Death Note, the Netflix movie that is, is an amalgamation of everything that could go wrong conceptually with making an American version of a Japanese series. And no, this has nothing to do with claims of "whitewashing" a Japanese franchise for Americans. The movie changed the setting to Seattle and changed the material to make it more accessible to Americans. They took a Japanese story and set it in America with American characters and iconography. It's different from Ghost in the Shell, where a white woman played a character that was meant to be Asian, and is instead more similar to The Magnificent Seven of all things; an American adaptation of a Japanese stories that Americans can more easily relate to. It just so happens that in this case, the title is the same between nations.

So anyway, with that little bit out of the way, I'm just going to be completely upfront when I say that Death Note was not a complete waste of time. It wasn't good, but this summer has had some truly awful pieces of trash hit theatres, and Death Note is perfectly passable. The problems with the movie come from very basic facts that anyone could have told going into it. How can you adapt a 12 volume, 36 episode anime into a 90 minute movie? How can you make a movie that has gone through two directors over the course of 6 years work? Hell, how can you make a concept as unusual as Death Note appeal to Americans? The answer to all of those question is sloppily.

Light Turner (no, not Yagami) is a high schooler in Seattle who mysteriously receives a book called a Death Note. Once he possess it, a shinigami, or God of Death, named Ryuk appears and tells him that Light can write anyone's name in the book and they will die. So Light, along with his new girlfriend Mia Sutton (no, not Misa Amane), start to go kill happy with the book, calling themselves Kira, a benevolent figure that will erase all evil and create a paradise. This interests an ace Interpol detective named L, who starts to figure out who Kira is and put a stop to their killing streak. It's a game of cat and mouse... only with dumb people.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but everyone in this movie is impulsive beyond all belief. L, Light, and Mia do things impulsively and without reason, which makes it a case of who makes the bigger mistake instead of, who is the first one to make a mistake. All three of them act like dumb American teenagers, which is a far cry from how they were in the original material. Now this would be fine because this is an original movie that is doing its own thing and is actually introducing many people to this story for the first time, but it's not doing it well. Light has little to no emotion and definitely doesn't come across as someone who could even kill over 400 people, Mia feels like she belongs in Twilight, and L is socially unstable to the point where we don't know if we're meant to root for him or find him annoying.

The only character that gives a fantastic turn is Ryuk, played by none other than Willem Dafoe. I mean... there's nothing really to add to that. It's the Green Goblin as a murderous and fickle God of Death. It's dream casting if I've ever heard of it. Moving right along.

I would dwell on the story a bit more, but as someone that has a casual interest in Death Note, I can safely say that if I was someone that had never heard of the series before, I would not be interested in seeing any more. The movie varies wildly from being dark with annoyingly stupid characters, to being unintentionally funny. Why? Well, having a really out of place soundtrack helps a ton.

Most of the movie is fairly quiet, but when the soundtrack finally decides to make an appearance with a set piece moment, the moment is ruined by the SUPER INTENSE AND FRANKLY EMO SONG CHOCIES. Like, it's Simple Plan levels of emo. In any other movie, the soundtrack would play as a parody from the intense darkness that's coming across. Instead, I was just laughing. Like, audibly laughing at the terrible soundtrack.

I'm not too upset at Death Note though. It failed, but it didn't ruin the franchise for me. It's just a misfire. It was a movie that tried to do something new and introduce Americans to a cool franchise, and it just didn't work. There's no really mystery or great discussion as to why Death Note didn't work. All you need to do is sit there, watch it, and you'll understand why. Some pieces just don't fit together as neatly as they should, but I can't say I'm too devastated about it. It wasn't offensively bad, but it's just boiler plate mediocre.