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J Watched Netflix’s Death Note 2017 [SPOILERS]

Introduction

When it comes to adaptations, viewers for the most part fall into two groups: fans of the original source material who want to see the adaptation do the original justice and viewers who have either no or some passing knowledge of the source material and are there to enjoy a movie. With Netflix's Death Note, the recent American film adaptation of the Japanese manga of the same name, I find myself in the second group.

Now, I'm not a complete Death Note virgin. I've been in fandom circles for the past 12 years now and with a series as iconic as Death Note, you can't not know at least a little about it. Personally, I've seen the first two episodes of the anime and the first Japanese live action film that came out. I saw these probably when I was fourteen or fifteen which dates my exposure to this series by about nine or ten years (I feel old...). The rest of what I know comes from the billions of internet memes, listening to one of my mega-fan friends talk about the series (these conversations also taking place nine or ten years ago), and whatever I happened to come across on my dashboard while scrolling through Tumblr.

I'm writing this introduction part out before I watch the movie. I wanted to jot down what I knew about the series and my position in relation to it so that everyone could know where I was coming from when I gave my review. So to establish a starting point for myself, here's what I (think I) know about the Death Note series (potentially inaccurate spoilers up ahead):

Death Note is about a genius high school student named Light Yagami who comes across a book, the titular Death Note, that has the power to kill a person if you write their name down in it. The book will even allow you to specify the time and details of the person's death and you can plot out their actions for quite some time leading up to their demise. Light sees the Death Note as a way to become a god and starts using it to rid the world of those he deems evil. Multiple deaths start occurring and somehow people come to the conclusion that a person is behind it and this person becomes known as “Kira.” A task force is organized with the purpose of bringing in Kira and Light's father is one of the people on this task force. Enter L, a detective who is very reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. His mental abilities far surpass the people around him, he displays strange quirks (a love of sweets and the strange manner in which he holds his body and how he sits), and his social skills are lacking and perhaps unimportant to him. L and Light are equally matched intellectually and a cat and mouse game begins to take place as they try to outsmart one another. Light's ego and increasing paranoia from being pursued by the police leads him to sometimes stray from his original intentions with the Death Note as he tries to destroy the people in his way.

Other characters I know about are Misa Amane and Ryuk. Misa has feelings for Light and has a Death Note of her own. She has an ability linked to the Death Note that Light finds useful and he treats her as a pawn in his bigger plan, keeping her around only because of this ability and not because he returns her feelings. Ryuk is a Shinigami, or Death God, and is connected to the Death Note. Only people who've touched the Death Note can see him and he spends a lot of his time snarking at Light and his plans. Also he really likes apples.

There's a scene in which L manages to trick Light into revealing his general location by limiting a news broadcast to a specific area and another scene where Light uses a potato chip to throw off the police and that's about all I know for plot points.

As you can see, I know probably about as much as one would get by reading a summary slapped on the back cover of a book, and I'm not even sure if some parts of my information is accurate. I'm pretty removed from the source material as I head into this movie. I've noticed that a lot of the fans of the original are very unhappy with the movie (to put it lightly) and I'm curious as a non-fan if I'll enjoy it. Are the problems with this film strictly as an adaptation or does it fall flat as a standalone as well? My review will look at the film first and foremost as a movie, but I will set aside some time at the end to reflect on it as an adaptation as well (though I'm not sure how much I can contribute to that conversation).

I'll see you all on the other side!

Review [Spoilers Ahead!]

There is so much to talk about.

This movie is bad. The lead is atrocious, the leaps in logic are ridiculous, and the movie can't for the life of it figure out what tone it's going for, but damn if I did not enjoy every minute of this movie.

I watched it with my dad, who knew absolutely nothing about Death Note going in, and we laughed our asses off. I'm reminded of the first time I watched Maximum Overdrive, and how the over the top ridiculousness of it just made it even more fun. It felt as though at every moment where they should have taken things seriously, someone in production tripped and dropped cheese onto the project.

There is a part in this film where, during what's supposed to be a serious and tragic moment, everything goes into slow-mo and “I Don't Wanna Live Without Your Love” by Chicago starts playing in the background. That is all I need to tell you for you to understand what kind of movie you're getting yourself into.

Let's start getting into the specifics of this beautiful disaster.

Everything about this film is over the top. A lot of the deaths are super gory in the film. Everyone's head has to explode, or their body has to explode. Human beings in this universe are one hard push away from gooey destruction. One guy in the film has a heart attack, but he couldn't just have a heart attack, he also had to fall down a flight of stairs. Mia's death at the end of the film wasn't gross, but it was still over the top. Homegirl fell down onto a display from a flower shop, petals erupting from her crash site in slow motion as an 80s love ballad played on in the background. Good lord.

Speaking of slow motion, there's a lot of it in this film, or at least it feels like there is. I wouldn't say that they use slow motion more in this movie than what is typically normal these days, but it's how they're using it. There aren't any complex choreographed action scenes in this film, the only times they use slow motion is to enhance a serious moment or to show off the aforementioned gore, and in the case of the former, it really doesn't work out. The use of slow motion to make things more dramatic reminds me of slow motion in 90s movies where I'm sure everyone at the time thought it was really enhancing the impact of the serious moment but in hindsight it's unintentionally funny.

The over the top nature of the film really hurts it. Everything is taken a step too far and because of that, what's supposed to be taken seriously becomes comical. Yes, I'll say that it's because of this that I really enjoyed the film, but that wasn't the intention here. This film wasn't supposed to entertain me in the way it did.

There were some good ideas in this film that never went all the way through. The soundtrack has a lot of 80s soft rock in it and even the score seems 80s inspired with its use of synthesizers. A lot of the important conversations and confrontations between characters take place with the actors lit up by a nearby neon sign. The chase scene towards the end of the movie where the characters are running through alleys and across construction sites, through a diner, also features a lot of neon lighting. It felt like the film was trying for an homage to 80s detective thrillers but they never fully committed to it. While I'm not sure an homage to 80s detective thrillers would have worked out, they shouldn't have just stopped halfway through the concept. Another good idea that went nowhere was the possible moral dilemma that naturally comes along with the nature of something like the Death Note. Being presented with the power to kill anyone with a low chance of getting caught is an Ethics professor's wet dream. We get some talk here and there of whether or not Kira has the right to do what they do, but it's in passing conversations that never go anywhere important.

There are certain things that I will say were genuinely good in this movie aside from a couple of the actors. I thought there was a lot of well shot scenes in this film, I thought the lighting at certain moments was good and as a fan of 80s music, I liked the soundtrack and score.

On to the characters. The ones I'll be focusing on are Light Turner, the person who receives the Death Note at the beginning of the film, Mia Sutton, Light Turner's crush, then girlfriend and partner-in-crime as the serial killer Kira, Ryuk, the Death God who gave Light Turner the Death Note, and L, the FBI detective determined to bring Kira in to answer for their crimes.

Light Turner. Dear God. First of all, besides Ryuk and L, all of the other characters from the series that I'm aware of got westernized names and honestly they should have done that for Light, because “Light Turner” is way too ridiculous for me to deal with right now and I'm probably going to say it as many times as I can in this review just because it makes me laugh. I guess the creative team thought that the fans might be mad if they changed Light's name, but man that is probably the last thing they should have been worried about and I'll get to that later.

I honestly have no idea what they were going for with Light Turner, because nothing they try sticks its landing. I haven't seen the actor, Nat Wolff, in anything before this, so I can't speak about his talents as an actor in general, but this didn't seem to be the right role for him. Most of his line delivery fell flat, there were times when Light Turner was supposed to say something sarcastic and he never got the timing or the tone right, and it seemed to me that every time he had to say a swear word, he'd fumble over it like he wasn't comfortable with saying it. It doesn't help when he has to act alongside established actors like Willem Dafoe and in general, a lot of his costars outperform him.

There wasn't any charisma or intensity to Light Turner. There's a part at the beginning where he's trying to defend his crush from a bully and his “threat” to this bully is telling him that because he was held back in school and is 18, if he hit Light Turner, it would technically be child abuse and he could get in tr-*punch* And yes, it was funny, but it was also kind of lame and it doesn't help Light Turner's character when added to what I have to believe is the now infamous “screaming scene” where he spends a full minute screaming like a goat and hiding under desks after seeing Ryuk for the first time. He's never able to shed that image of him during the rest of the film, making his more serious moments hard to take seriously.

Throughout the film, there are times when other characters will speak about how smart Light Turner is, but we're never really shown anything to suggest that he's smarter than the people around him, in fact, he does things that are very, very stupid. I'm not kidding when I say that this guy is probably the worst serial killer I've ever seen, and it's kind of troubling that I know I'd be able to pull it off better than he does. Right off the bat, he shows the Death Note to Mia the day after he kills his first two victims and goes as far as to kill another person to prove it to her that it actually works. This is stupid for many obvious reasons and he doesn't stop there. He and Mia decide to use the Death Note to rid the world of evil, he chooses the name “Kira” then acknowledges that in some languages Kira means “Light.” When Mia smartly points out that that would make it easier for people to connect to the killings to him should they look hard enough, he tells her that it's okay because Kira also “kind of means 'killer' in Japanese,” and then uses that point to throw people off but even that is seen through eventually (by L, but the fact remains that he saw through it). His father, James, is investigating Kira, and Light Turner is cartoonishly suspicious whenever he tries to get information on how the investigation's coming along from his dad. At the end of the film, Light Turner pulls off some genius plan using the Death Note, but let me tell you, nothing in the movie leading up to that point led me to believe that he was smart enough to do that. This point actually brings me to Mia.

Mia Sutton starts out as Light Turner's love interest but then becomes, in my opinion, the head of the operation when it comes to their activity as Kira. She's more cold and calculating than Light Turner, and enjoys the god aspect of being Kira more than he does, referring to the people of the world as sheep. Mia would go as far as she needed to go to keep Kira a secret, which is something Light Turner wouldn't do. She's so ruthless that I honestly found her a more interesting character than Light Turner, she definitely made a smarter killer than he did and sometimes I felt as though L should have been pursuing her rather than Light Turner as the person behind Kira. At the very least, L, as smart as he's supposed to be, should have been able to deduce that Kira was not one person, but two. The script pushed so hard for it to be between Light and L (probably because they had to, but that's a point for later) that even though Mia's doing a lot of the driving as Kira, her involvement is basically ignored by the plot at certain points. I will say that as much as I enjoy her character, this is still Netflix's Death Note, and she doesn't escape the fate the other characters suffer. She doesn't do anything ground breaking, and really, it's hard not to outshine Light Turner in this movie. She also falls victim to the idiocy that plagues most of the characters in this film, like using the testimony of random people on the internet as good enough evidence that a person deserves to die (though honestly I'm not sure if she particularly cares about the guilt of the people she kills, but we're not allowed to learn anything about who she is and what drives her), and eventually getting outsmarted by Light Turner, which is super embarrassing.

Ryuk is...fine? I mean he's just sort of there. Willem Dafoe does a good job with his voice work here but the character honestly isn't given much to do. I liked how they presented Ryuk in the film, always keeping him partially in the shadows. His glowing eyes peeking out of the darkness was really cool, and judging by the effects on him that I could see when he moved a little further in the light, I do think the shadows help make up for the limitations of what they could do. He looks more real this way, and yeah it's bad that the CGI's quality requires this sort of trick, but honestly it's better than parading poor effects around in the light.

L was pretty interesting in the first half of his screen time. Lakeith Stanfield is a good actor and he played his part well. His obsession with candy, how he carried himself, and his weird way of sitting in chairs fit well into the movie, but I'm not sure if this was a good thing. It was definitely ridiculous to watch and at times it was hard to take him seriously, but when I think about it, Light Turner was hard to take seriously so it kind of works out fine in this ridiculous movie. One thing that bothered me about his character is the insane leaps in logic he had. He jumped to conclusions quite a bit in this film and he  doesn't really explain himself very well if at all. Yes, most of his deductions turned out to be right, but that doesn't excuse the writers for cutting corners. There's a point in this movie where L's associate and father figure, Watari, is in danger and is ultimately killed, and after that L's character goes off the rails. He becomes angry and reckless. He ends up getting his hands on a gun and the final confrontation between him and Light Turner is a chase scene. I'm honestly very split on the shift in L's character. It's obvious from Lakeith Stanfield's performance earlier in the film that he did some homework and tried to stay true to the L from the anime. He nailed his idiosyncrasies to the point where it's hard to view his performance without thinking about the anime. With everyone else so divorced from the characters that they're supposedly playing, he was the one character that was still pretty faithful and it's hard not to take note of that. So then comes the character shift. From what I know about the anime I don't think L would act like this, but just looking at the L that appears in this film who's under the control of a different creative mind, maybe he would. It's also hard to deny that there are moments when Lakeith Stanfield does a good job of getting across the anguish, anger, and grief his character is experiencing. I guess ultimately what disappoints me about the turn L takes in this film is that I wanted more of an intellectual confrontation between him and Light Turner, and then what follows that is the deeper disappointment of realizing that Light Turner doesn't seem smart enough for that kind of confrontation. Maybe they had to make L into a last minute action character to make the confrontation with his adversary work.

One scene I just have to talk about in full is the chase scene which has to be my favorite scene in the movie as well as a perfect example of everything wrong with the film. The chase starts off with L in a police car armed with a gun and driving like a maniac through the streets trying to catch Light Turner, who's currently escaping on foot. At several points, L nearly runs down pedestrians and at one point crashes through an ironic sign about safe driving because this movie can't help itself. Eventually, L leaves his car and begins to pursue Light Turner on foot and I swear to God these two run through specific places just so that they have people to push out of the way and stuff to knock over. The movie is so convinced that watching them push people over is super cool and action-y and wow that at one point they show Light Turner running through a back alley that just happens to have a group of twenty people standing there and positioned so that they block the entire way through and Light Turner has to push them aside. The boys take a turn into a stereotypical action diner, entering through the back so they have to run through the kitchen and then they go out to the seating area and through the front door. Again, because this movie just can't help itself, as L runs through the seating area of the diner, he bumps into one of the patrons and accidentally shoves the man's face into his bowl of soup. The whole way through this, L is shouting after Light Turner and Light Turner is letting out little high pitched yelps. It's so dumb, so cheesy, and so beautiful. I love this scene.

For the most part, I've tried to avoid talking about this film in comparison to the original source material, but the rest that I have to say about it only makes sense if I talk about it as an adaptation so I'm going to head into that now.

Light Turner's character is a really dramatic departure from his anime counterpart, and in some respects I feel like this is kind of insulting to the western audience this adaptation was made for. Light from the source material was a mastermind, a megalomaniac, a genius. Light Turner is a stereotypical high school loser edgelord with a crush on the popular girl. The only thing the two Lights really have in common is that they're high school students and their fathers are in law enforcement. None of the original Light's character traits were carried over. It makes me think that the creative team or the marketing team didn't think we could be invested in a story with a complex character like Light Yagami, that our dumb western minds weren't ready for the intense intellectual cat and mouse game of the source material and that's why we got the lazy Hollywood trope for our lead and ended the movie with a chase and a sequence on a collapsing ferris wheel. Not to mention the changes they made for Light Turner really reminded me of how they adjusted Goku for an American audience in Dragon Ball Evolution. It's just about as lazy as you can get when westernizing a concept. The westernization is so predictable that they jammed a school dance into this. Really.

Mia, from what I can gather, is supposed to be the American version of Misa Amane, and the difference is even greater in this case than it was for the two Lights. It's funny how in this adaptation, the relationship dynamic between Light and Misa seems to have completely flipped. By the end of the film, Mia seemed more like the Light from the original than Light Turner did.

One of the thoughts that I came out of this movie with was that this might have been better off as a spin-off of Death Note rather than an adaptation of the original story, and my reasoning all comes down to the nature of Kira. Light as Kira in the original was an egotistical, calculating killer, taking careful steps to not get caught. Light Turner and Mia as Kira in the adaptation was more reminiscent of teenage couple spree killers. They make reckless mistakes, killing people too close to home, they seem to make a date night out of choosing their next victims, and the killings fuel their romance, especially from Mia's side. These different types of killers with different motivations will naturally make for different types of stories, and it feels like the creators in the adaptation's case really didn't want to make it. With how dramatically they changed Light and Misa, it seems to me that they liked the concept of the Death Note, not the story, but the book itself.

This movie focuses on the “what if” scenario of two dumb, jaded, pretentious kids suddenly having the power to kill whoever they want and what happens afterwards. That's not what the original Death Note was about, true, but it's still a story that could have been interesting. It's just that it wasn't the story the adaptation was supposed to tell, and I don't think it was right to try to tell that story with characters that weren't theirs. Even with original characters, this film still doesn't work, but it's not as insulting.

Final Thoughts

In the end this is a really bad adaptation, and possibly an entertainingly bad movie so long as you don't have any strong feelings for the source material. I feel kind of bad for enjoying this film as much as I did, especially when I think back on all the horrible comic book adaptations I've seen in my life, but I can't help but recommend this movie to the So Bad, It's Good crowd, so long as you don't know anything about Death Note. To all the Death Note fans, I'm so sorry.

(And a final tidbit I couldn't find anywhere else to bring up: The calculus book that plays a crucial role in this film is the same textbook my dad used in college back in 1972, and he got very excited about it. This book has been out of print for a long time, so I have no idea why Mia has it.)