BurtonReviews Netflix’s Death Note: Have You Seen The Light?

(Image sourced from https://heroichollywood.com/death-note-ryuk-willem-dafoe/)

Ah anime…wait, haven’t we been here before? A beloved and classic anime property, a live action movie incoming, controversy and fan out cry (not of the good kind) towards all the marketing material, the fate of anime to western live action adaptations in the balance! Let’s hope it goes better than last time, but I don’t think we have a Ghost of a chance, if you catch my drift.

(Video sourced from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvxNaSIB_WI)

The story of Death Note follows Light Ya-I mean Turner, Light Turner (Nat Wolff), your average all black wearing teenage boy who fills his time with angst, moodily looking off into the distance, and more angst. But when a mysterious black book falls from the sky filled with the promise of killing whoever is written inside of it, a Death Note if you will, what else is a young man to do but start a worldwide campaign of brutal justice and appoint yourself the god of such a peaceful world…that’s where my mind went to anyway, don’t know about you.

From the very first trailer of this suspicious adaptation I was worried. None of the characters looked like they would be anything like they’re anime counterparts, and on top of that it seemed they’d be almost the complete opposite. I didn’t get why they just didn’t make completely new characters of American origin and say the Death Note landed on their doorstep after Light’s turn with the deadly device. And I still don’t get why they didn’t do that because this movie’s biggest failure is its utter incompetence when handling the original source material. Character’s aren’t anything like they are in the anime, but instead weaker and less interesting else-world versions of themselves, circumstances so epic and intense from the show are rushed and deflated here, and overall I’m just left feeling muddled about what this movie wanted to be. If it wanted to make completely new characters and use the Death Note as a cool plot device to see how it twists people, cool, that sounds like an interesting addition to the Death Note franchise, but by giving the characters of this movie the same names of their much more entertaining anime versions you attach an inescapable expectation to the characters that is almost impossible to meet. And whether its fair or not, it still happens and detrimentally lessens the movie as you cant help but yell out at the screen “Light wouldn’t do that, he’s way smarter than to make that simple and easily avoidable mistake”.

And that is all I will say in regards to comparing this movie to its original anime source material, because they are on two completely different levels, and to be fair the anime did have many, many episodes to enthral and flesh out its characters, this movie only has about 1 hour and 40 minutes.

(Image sourced from https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/3/15142608/hollywood-anime-live-action-adaptations-ghost-in-the-shell)

While the characters of this movie were disappointingly flat and confusing at times, the acting put behind them was satisfying enough. Nat Wolff as owner of the Death Note Light Turner does a fine job at portraying this in-way-over-his-head teen who just wanted to kill some baddies but is now being praised as a death god. You can really see the effort and care he is putting into portraying such a beloved property, but the material he is given fails him at every turn as Light is at times annoying not smart enough, then the next scene he is a terrifying super-genius that the fans of the show want to see. And his convictions are just as muddled as that, I never got a good sense of the moral standings he had to be shook by this almighty power in the first place, and in a story of showing how absolute power corrupts absolutely, not really getting a grasp of the characters convictions at almost any point in the movie highly decreases the impacts of the script’s bigger questions.

And while Light wasn’t the 2D drawn Light we all know and fear, one character did get his terrifying sense of murderous purpose in this movie, and surprisingly that was Mina (Margaret Qually). Qually does a great job at becoming the damaged dark and messed up highschooler who thinks deplorable acts of violence are way cool; and it was refreshing to see what was a stereotypical blonde-air head fanatic of Light’s in this version become a formidable and actually smart character, even if it was also terrifying. But what didn’t quite sit well with this change was the reasoning behind it, there was no reason, Mina is just one effed up person in this. This lack of rhyme or reason, again, detracted from the character because it just felt like she was doing it to be edgy instead of for a real and intriguing reason.

Sadly the character remodelling on the other side of this battle of morals didn’t quite work out either. Once a formidable and unimaginably smart detective, the man only known by the letter L (Lakeith Stanfield), in this movie is turned into nothing more than a smart crazy person. Stanfield is an incredible actor, don’t get me wrong, he perfectly absorbed the many eccentric quirks of L’s outcast personality and made them all feel natural to how he behaves instead of the tacked on out there weird habits they could have felt like, and his fast talking but precise diction went a long way to creating this image of an impossibly smart and renowned detective. But when the script calls for him to go off the deep end, L is degraded to nothing more than a unhinged crazy man, a move that both feels cheap and utterly dissatisfying as the mental chess game that should be going on between him and Light simply becomes L waving a gun in Light’s face.

(Image sourced from https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15893234/death-note-trailer-live-action-netflix)

However, there is one golden nugget to be found in this sea of tainted stock, and that is Willem Dafoe as the actual death god Ryuk, Lights untrustworthy hand of guidance to using the Death Note. From the moment it was announced Dafoe was the perfect casting for the character, he already has the spine chilling voice and gravitas to pull off being an other-worldly god of mayhem and destruction, put a layer of CGI over him and we’re golden. And that’s pretty much what they did, Dafoe’s menacingly joyful voice when seeing how humans react to having the Death Note was perfect to the character and really made me wish he was still the Green Goblin. Put on top of that some top-notch CGI in bringing the grey skinned, long fingered, spiky haired god to life, and Ryuk was the shining star of this adaptation and a joy to see play around on screen once again.

Another saving grace of this movie was the appropriate and almost palpable style employed here. While it sometimes did feel abit over the top and used just to grab any waning attention again like an over-baring MTV grunge music video, this very stylised approach for the film did give it a visually interesting tone that did grab me at the very top of the movie. creepily twisting camera angles, the grey and dank colour pallet that is suddenly overwhelmed by pops of oversaturated neon light, and licensed songs that perfectly exclaimed the emo tone this movie was going for all came together to equally entertain and annoy, but there was one thing it did for the whole 1 hour 40 minute runtime, and that was keep my attention.

However some tonal decisions made for this movie didn’t quite fit, and that oddly enough was a strange layer of out-of-place comedic moments peppered throughout. From Light’s strange girly scream, to awkward flat jokes, these moments just didn’t mesh with the overly serious and dire atmosphere the rest of this movie was creating and stuck out like a swore thumb.

(Image sourced from http://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/death-note-netflix-movie-reaction-comic-con-1201858232/)

But what was the biggest hindrance to this movie even scraping the brilliance that the series did was the all too quick pacing. Death Note sprints from event to event with little time to let you breathe or process what happens, and this is probably the biggest reason that nothing in this movie really sinks in or left an impact on me after the credits rolled. No time is really given to understanding the characters motivations or turns in perspective, lines are given to allow for some reason to be discerned, but by the time you have digested what that means for the character, 5 important events from the anime have already happened. Major plot points from the show feel like mere stepping stones here as the rush that this movie seems to have to get through each one as soon as possible makes them feel less important than they should be and in the end makes this journey feel a lot cheaper than this surprisingly intellectual thriller should.

Overall Netflix’s Death Note is a failure in almost every way. While the talent put into the project was more than capable to bring a good script to life, the style employed to bring it to life was perfectly appropriate to the source material and gave the movie a visual flare unique from anything else on the Netflix shelf, the poor construction of this movie’s characters, the blue hedgehog like speed of its pacing, and its utter betrayal of the source material leaves much to be desired and just really makes me want to watch the anime again.

Death Note = 5/10

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