Death Note

Death Note is a thriller based on Japanese manga named Death Note. Light, a high school student, picked up the Death Note and decided to kill all the criminals. With the name of Kira, he killed 400 people with his girlfriend. Kira was favored by some people,but some wanted to catch Kira, a murder. The director used different Mise-en-Scene techniques such as lighting, color, and composition,  to make the story more vivid.

The movie started with a sunny school day. The sun was shining and students were playing on the ground. The weather changed in a suddenly which indicated there were something about to happen. The wind started to blast everything up and it started to rain. A gust of wind brought LIght a mysterious notebook.

The director made the lighting change sharply to introduce the evil from the notebook. All lights were turned off unexpectedly in the school building when Light was reading the mysterious notebook in a classroom alone. It was dark in the hallway and the classroom was dim lit with some light from outside the window.

A lot of glass beads in different color rolled into Light. The colorful bead was strongly contrast with the darkness. At the time the evil showed up, Light was too scared to hit down the shelves. Plenty of small colored paper was flying in the air.   

Ryuk, the evil, taught Light how to use the notebook. Light killed a bully in his school first and killed the guy who killed his mother later. When Light was sitting in a gym reading the Death Note rules, Mia appeared in the screen. At the beginning of the movie, they just looked at each other in a long distance. This time, Mia sat beside Light, then she sat even closer to Light to talk about the bully’s death. The change of their physical distance showed the change of their relationship. After Light told Mia about the notebook, they were in relationship very soon.

They began to kill people that they thought to be a criminal. A world famous detective alias L was looking for Light. Light wanted to quit, but Mia still thought they were doing the right thing. They could burn a page in order to save the person whose name was on the page. But the burning would only work for once. Therefore, Mia wrote down Light’s name on the notebook. Once Light die, the notebook would automatically passed to Mia and save Light’s life. When Light realized that Mia wrote down his name, he calmed down and wrote some sentences on the notebook. At the time he was writing, many police were looking for Light. Light wrote and ran fast to meet with his girlfriend. In this short period, he used his pen to he killed his girlfriend and saved his own life even though both of them fell from a ferris wheel. His quick reaction corresponded to the beginning of the movie. He was a brilliant schoolboy who wrote paper for other.  

This story was a little bit confuse in the way how notebook worked. It looked like everybody could wrote on the notebook and killed people. If so, why should Mia killed Light in order to become the owner of notebook? Compared to the manga, the characterization in this movie was not as good as the mango. In the manga, the detective L was a genius and always kept calm. However, in this movie, L lost his head when his partner was missing.