Death Note: Post Mortem

I watched Death Note, the Netflix Original, and well it was not that bad. Save for the ending it was alright. If it hadn't been an adaption of one of the most famous and deep animes of all time, I would have written it off as just another movie with a good premise but poor execution.

The premise of the movie follows some of the shows cliff notes, save for some names, (we're in America now, for some reason, not that it affects the plot at all). Light Turner finds the notebook of the shinigami, (literal translations, death god, death spirit), Ryuk. Light decides he will rid the world of crime. He attracts the attention of interpol and the mysterious detective known as L.

My peers JBurns, and WSills gave their thoughts on the movie. While I agree with mostly agree with what they said and I suggest you read them. I'm going to look more at why I think this movie fails as an interpretation and will heavily pull on the anime for comparison.

Almost anyone who has read the manga, watched the anime, or watched the Wisecrack video on Death Note can tell you it focuses heavily on asking what is justice. Each character has a different take and understanding on what justice is. The show then heavily takes a Socratic take on the various perspectives of justice. Rather than telling us what justice is, the show rather tests the ideals of “justice”. It's obvious you couldn't put that much dialogue on such a topic in a less than two hour movie. The writers clearly understood that, but they went the wrong way about it. They hand waved it away instead of the better but slightly harder way of ADAPTING the themes. In case you're curious as to what the movie did with these deep ideas, they just gave one sentence on the topic with a very Original idea. “There is no such thing as good and evil, only bad and worse”, which we've never seen a Netflix Original ever.

In it's place for central themes we have, we, I don't really know. If you look online you will find a joke that says the central theme is “Don't give your crazy psycho girlfriend a book that can kill people”, as ridiculous as that sounds that is the strongest/most obvious theme of the movie. I embarrassingly forgot to take notes while watching the film, so I'm working from memory. I had three main ideas as to what the themes could be. The first could be that it was making a criticism on the U.S. gun safety laws. The only thing I have to go on is the prominence of the American flag in the movie, but this idea would fail since we have nothing to compare the usage of the Death Note to, the cops use state issued guns so maybe that's the theme. The other idea I had was maybe it was talking about how power will always corrupt people. This fails since only Mia (the American Misa) gets corrupted while Light (unlike in the original) stays a “good” person. The only other thing is a commentary on the abuse of authority. This one is the strongest, we actually have a few scenes that bring seem to talk about that idea, but it's not strongly conveyed enough to convince me of this theory.

In my opinion a good adaption that shows the writers really cared about the series is proper theming and characters. I feel like there is definitely more wiggle room on adapting a central theme, after all many people will have a different idea on what the central theme is. The characters however are something that should be kept very consistent to the original. How did the movie do? bad, really really bad. At the start of the anime and through the stint where Light gives up the notebook we can get a decent understanding of what Light was like before the notebook corrupted him. He was a logical, intelligent, character of a strong moral position, hesitant to even try the notebook, and had a great respect of the law. The movie version of Light is the exact opposite of this, and never changes. He runs heavily on emotions and hormones, quickly revealing the notebook to Mia because he has a crush on her. In the original series Light would plan several steps ahead and never second guess himself. While we did see movie Light use on or two clever tricks, he wanted to pull out of using the notebook as soon as things got out of hand.

I feel like we should talk about L now, he seems to have been ignored during this entire paper. L is probably the most accurate portrayal of a central character. We see him be weird and eccentric, but most importantly in this case, we see him make logical deductions and use critical thinking. That is until Watari dies and he becomes an irrational emotional character. Instead of losing to an unavoidable trap like in the anime/manga. He loses to a cook knocking him out because he was too stupid to not think that the person might support Kira.

Mia is most likely supposed to be based on Misa from the anime/manga. I can only guess this because she is Light's girlfriend shares a similar name. Personality wise she is nothing alike. I think like most people the writers hated Misa and decided to change her. While I have nothing against making Misa less annoying or less pointless I think they did it too much. Mia is far closer to the anime Light. Manipulative, driven, ruthless, and plotting, she even gets corrupted by the note instead of Light. To a point I think making her the main character would have been a better change of pace.

Interesting thing about these characters is how tightly the are tied to each other. If one of them changes they all do. Light and L are the clear rivals and the two sides of the same coin, while Misa/Mia is the foil to Light. I think by trying to make Light the hero and a “relatable character” they ruined the whole cast and the show as a side result. I don't think a character needs to be sympathetic to be likable or relatable. The anime Light was repulsive, but we all rooted for him while we also cheered at him losing.

I don't think the movie was awful, sure it wasn't great, it was rushed, and I don't think the team behind it cared about the franchise so much as how much money they could get fans of the franchise to pay. As an adaptation however; this movie is terrible. It changes things that don't need to be changed, and things that should've been changed were ignored. I think the root of the problem was a lack of love and passion more than a lack of talent.