I’m sure we all remember the uproar and backlash of last years’ live action rendition of “Death Note”. Before the film had even released, the IMDb page had already been filled with hundreds of negative reviews. Die hard fans of the manga and anime had their pitchforks at the ready and began to tear the film apart. It currently has a rating of 4.6/10 user score on IMDb. As a person who at the time had not read or seen any of the source material, I decided to give it a try.
I thought the film started off relatively well, setting up some of it’s characters quite quickly and didn’t waste time getting on with the story. I assumed that eventually the pace would slow down, giving the story space to breathe and time for things to settle, allowing for realistic character development and cohesive writing. This didn’t happen. The film jets through it’s 90 minutes, never really stopping, allowing plot holes to arise, and for things to seem like they’ve been written all too conveniently. When the film had finished, I felt like I had just wasted an hour and a half on a poorly written film that I couldn’t care less about.
As the initial concept of the film seemed relatively interesting to me, I decided to then watch the anime. Straight away I was aware that the film had deviated from the source material big time. The anime was well written, clever, along with having characters that felt real. Ironically, the characters in the film seem to be more 2D than their anime counterparts. The motivation of Light Turner (Nat Wolff) seems meaningless, his intended battle of wits with “L” (Lakeith Stanfield) is non-existent, and the characters unrealistically leap to conclusions, almost as if they themselves have read the script. The anime itself sometimes suffers from this problem, but at least it tries its best to flesh out coherent thought and make the character’s conclusions seem realistic.
Ultimately, Death Note (2017) is a terrible adaptation, and leaves a lot to be desired.
4/10
Centre of Cinema 