Death Note Review

For my blog entry I recently watched the 2017 American version of the anime Death Note. Personally, I have never watched the anime and, quite frankly, am not a fan of the overall style of it. That said, the premise is very interesting and was directed by Adam Wingard, who had previously helmed the 2016 Blair Witch and The Guest, two movies that I really dug and find severely underrated. Not to mention, Willem Dafoe voices the main antagonist which is always a plus.

            Like one of my peers, JBurns2112, who also has a review for this movie up on the blog, the film is definitely flawed. That said, I found enough redeeming moments in the film to actually enjoy it for what it was.

            Let’s first get the negatives out of the way. First off is the writing. It was penned by three different writers (already a bad sign) whose previous work include “films” such as Immortals, The Lazarus Effect, and the 2015 Fantastic Four remake. Much like the writing in those, Death Note is constantly plagued by clichéd characters, horrible dialogue, a very generic narrative structure, as well as incredibly repetitive story elements. Using the repetition as an example here, the film follows a basic structure: character kills someone, character begins to doubt himself, character continues after encouragement from girlfriend and villain. This process is played out too many times. Additionally, the film has an undeserved “happy” ending that felt forced and did a complete 360 from where the plot had been moving beforehand. The characterizations of the protagonist Light and his girlfriend Mia are so boring and generic which are made all the worse by their actors Nat Wolff and Margaret Qualley. While I’ve never seen Wolff before, I saw Qualley in last year’s The Nice Guys where I thought she was great. I have a feeling that the bad performances were less on the actors here and more on the horrible writing. In all fairness, I don’t think even Christian Bale could have made this dialogue work. The bad writing then combined with bad editing to make the film feel very unbalanced throughout. Within the first ten minutes of the film, Light already has the Death Note. By the fifteen-minute mark, he has already shown his girlfriend his powers. Not even a half hour in and we’ve already seen the Light has basically killed almost every criminal out there. This leaves over an hour left to focus on the manhunt for him which, considering how fast the film started, felt very dragging and kind of boring. The other major problem with the film that I found was the cinematography. While I applaud Wingard and director of photography David Tattersall for trying to do some creative camerawork, it was way too much. They utilized a lot of unnecessary crane shots and zoom shots that did not work at all. These kinds of camerawork are effective in big budget blockbusters and huge epics, not a small town horror flick. In addition, there was way too much emphasis placed on slow motion that wore old by about the second use.

            Now that we have the negatives out of the way, let’s look at what was good here. The absolute best part of the film was the soundtrack composed by Leopold Ross and his Academy Award winning brother Atticus. Atticus Ross had previously done scores to films such as The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl, all wonderful scores, and his expertise really shines through here. The score feels very synthesized, something that Wingard utilized to perfection in The Guest. Of all the films I’ve seen this year, this has to be one of the best scores of any of them. Another highlight of the film was the visual effects. As JBurns2112 mentioned in their review, the film takes great pride in showing off gory, Final Destination-esque deaths. Personally, I’m okay with that, especially considering I’m a huge horror movie buff. However, if the effects were mediocre, then I would have a problem with that. Thankfully, the makeup and gore effects are absolutely top of the line here. Of course when talking about the special effects of the film, I have to at least mention Ryuk, the “8-foot-tall demon-looking motherf%@#er” as described in the film by the protagonist. For a Netflix original, his effects weren’t bad. For the most part, they keep him in the shadows, which I think works for the best as it not only hides the CGI, but it also allows the character to remain more mysterious. The last positive I want to mention here are a few of the performances. The easy standout is Willem Dafoe as Ryuk, who stole every single scene he was in to an incredible degree. Another standout performance here was severely underrated character actor Shea Wigham (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook) as the protagonist’s cop father. Overall, while the two leads weren’t very good, much of the supporting cast was.

In conclusion, Death Note is slightly better than the typical run of the mill horror film mainly due to a few standout performances, the effects, and the music. Unfortunately, the horrible writing keeps it from being anything more than that, despite a solid premise.