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.

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.

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.