REVIEW: Death Note (live action movie)

This is the first of my post-vacation review posts. If you're not familiar with those, they tend to be filled with spoilers because most of them are for series I only read once a year in large chunks, and my spoilers are the best way for me to keep track of what happened. The best place to see my reviews if you're really worried about spoilers is Goodreads, LibraryThing, or Booklikes. My movie reviews, like this one, are only cross-posted to LibraryThing.

All right, on to the post. Death Note is a live action loose adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba's Death Note manga. It should be noted that a live action movie adaptation of the manga already exists. I reviewed it way back in 2008 (be warned, my reviewing style was much different back then) and, although it differed from the manga in many ways, it was still a much more faithful adaptation than Netflix's version.

I wasn't originally going to watch and review this movie due to its issues with whitewashing and my suspicions that it would be a terrible adaptation, but since Netflix decided to go ahead and make a sequel, I figured I'd finally take a look at what they were working with.

This adaptation stars Light Turner, a loser white kid who thinks he's much smarter than he actually is, as opposed to the original work's Light Yagami, who, as I recall, was respected, reasonably well-liked, and genuinely smart. This new Light comes across something called the Death Note, which he almost immediately uses to decapitate a bully. Although Ryuk, the demon (I don't recall the movie using the word "shinigami," but I could be mistaken) tied to the notebook, terrifies Light, that doesn't stop him from using the notebook some more. His next victim is the man who killed his mother.

After Light excitedly lets his cheerleader crush in on his new secret, the two go on what is essentially a killing spree with the notebook, killing hundreds of criminals. But of course that can't last forever - Light finds himself with some hard decisions to make after a task force is put together to catch "Kira" (the name Light gives the media, in the hope that people will think this mysterious killer is Japanese), headed by his own father. Light's father's efforts are aided by a mysterious investigator known only as L.

Overall, this was better than I expected it to be, as long as I tried not to compare it to the original series. As an adaptation, however, it was utter crap.

You may have already noticed, but I wasn't a fan of this new Light. It looked like the writers were trying to present him as someone with a strong sense of justice, but the levels of gore in his first killings belied that. By the way, there was none of that "if you just write someone's name they die of a heart attack." No, in this movie, either Light chose how a person died (usually something awful and bloody) or Ryuk got to choose.

I lost all hope that he'd be even half as clever as manga Light when he told Mia (the movie's version of Misa?) about the Death Note. It was an incredibly stupid thing to do, and I was completely unsurprised when this decision blew up in his face later on. I will say this: I had thought it'd go a lot worse than it did, especially when it was revealed that Mia had actually read all of the Death Note rules, whereas idiot Light had only skimmed them.

I initially liked the decision to cast a black actor as L. It still didn't make up for the decision to make nearly everyone else white and set the whole thing in Seattle, but at least the brilliant and eccentric young detective wasn't yet another white guy. Unfortunately, this L wasn't any more faithful to the original L than Light Turner was to Light Yagami. The most prominent differences appeared late in the movie, after Light did something L absolutely couldn't tolerate. I can't recall how the original L reacted when this same thing happened to him, but I don't remember him completely losing it. Also, I feel like the original L would never have done what Netflix's L was starting to do at the end of the movie.

Ryuk, too, didn't feel in keeping with the spirit of the original. He was depicted as an actual demon, the sort you're never supposed to make a deal with because the deal won't go the way you planned. He came across as actively malevolent, whereas the original Ryuk was more passive and, as I recall, just hoping that the Death Note would be put to enough use to alleviate his boredom.

The end of this first movie was definitely set up to invite a sequel. I'm not inclined to watch it, however. The characters were mangled badly enough in this first movie, and I don't want to see what they'll become in the second.