Death Note (2017 Film) Review and Discussion

(will add pictures later, just thought i'd post it all once finished)

Full disclosure, before I begin: you need to see the 2017 film adaptation of Death Note. Not because it’s a cinematic masterpiece, not because it does anything intelligent with its source material, not even because it has Jesus Christ as the Shinigami (Death God), but because it’s an excellent example of how sometimes, in an adaptation, making changes to the source material for the sake of doing something different isn’t always a good idea. Also, you need to see the 2017 film adaptation of Death Note because it’s a museum-worthy trainwreck, in every sense of the word except literal. Although this film’s Light Yagami probably crashed more than a few trains, the lil’ edgy fuck.

Spoiler-Free Review: 

4/10, at best. An edgy, scowling, seemingly-intelligent Seattleite (SeattleLight?) student by the name of Light Turner, who has to deal with truly harrowing problems like doing other people’s homework for money and occasionally getting glared at by bullies, happens across a notebook – with the inscription “Death Note” plastered on the front – that fell from the sky into his school’s courtyard. The moment Light picks this notebook up, he’s immediately accosted by some cackling juggalo known as Ryuk, a Shinigami (Death God) and the apparent owner of that notebook. He tells Light how it works: write someone’s name down in the notebook, and they will die. After Light tests it out on some random white trash bully with immediate, successful, gory results, he immediately falls back into delusions of grandeur and teams up with some emo backseater bitch named Mia Sutton to begin murdering criminals (as well as some other chucklefucks they don’t like, including an entire nightclub and… collapsing a cathedral???) under the guise of “Kira”, which naturally attracts the attention of the police, including a notorious, secretive detective named L. Secretive in that he will cover (half of) his face with a mask and not reveal his full name, but apparently not secretive enough to pass up the opportunity to show himself on live television. He’s a genius, trust us. Light now basically has to juggle killing… criminals I guess, the unorthodox L’s constant prying, and staying under the radar from his milquetoast police officer dad named Soichi—er, I mean, James Turner. A lot of shit happens from thence.

Film has decent direction and cinematography at best, bad sound mixing, and a ghastly soundtrack featuring 80’s staples like Air Supply and Chicago, because American-based 80’s synthpop ballads are absolutely befitting of an Asian-produced crime thriller drama involving secretive mass murderers, garish-looking gods of death, and edgy, teenaged Hot Topic mugwumps without a speck of neon to be found in their clothing (the score fares better though; it’s not half-bad at all). Predominantly unlikable cast, either perversions or distillations of previously well-developed and well-used characters. Film veers wildly from mildly interesting to hilariously awful to chaotic at a breakneck pace, and somehow manages to throw in an irrelevant high school prom scene somewhere in the mix. Interesting, ambiguous ending does make the film go out on a better note than it began, but the inconsistent, largely-unimpressive first half leaves a lot to be desired. No Matsuda. 4/10.

this isn't a worrisome shot at all

Spoileriffic Review (for the show/anime and for the movie; the show will be referred to as DN, the movie as Death Note):

4/10. Basically, this movie is fucking whack, and anybody who says otherwise is either lying to themselves or being ironic. This movie sucks dick for a whole lot of reasons, but perhaps most jarring and unintentionally-intriguing is how very much alike it is to DN’s controversial, divisive last ten or twelve episodes, the ones with Mello and Near and Light fucking dying because of Matsuda’s slippery fingers and a death notebook that was stored away in a bank or something. The general consensus is that these last episodes aren’t very good compared to the twenty-five episodes before it. But seriously, this film has all the exact same problems: one-dimensional characters, contrivances galore, either breakneck pacing or no pacing at all (never in-between), and a distinct lack of influence from L. You see, the reason L had no real influence in the last third of DN was because he was fucking dead; Light killed him once and for all. In the film? L never dies, he’s alive for all of its drain-circling 100 minutes. And yet, he somehow has even less effect and influence here breathing than he did as a corpse.

bruh

The reason DN worked was largely because of the incredible dynamics between Light and L, and the interesting amount of chemistry, tension, and stakes that could be drawn from just seeing the two trying to secretly outwit the other. It was a battle of wits between two very similar geniuses, and this was because their ideologies were almost completely dissimilar. Thus, it created a very interesting dynamic, especially in the scenes where the two got to interact one-on-one, where they subtly played mind games and actual, real-life tennis with one another. Another reason DN worked so well is because (at least in the first two-thirds of the show) both Light and L had legitimate, well-explained reasons for believing what they believed, and the show took pains to illustrate the pros and cons in both ideologies. An average viewer could be justified in liking either/or, because they both have incredibly thorough philosophies. Even if you personally didn’t agree with Light’s “ends justify the means” mentality, another person with different sociopolitical or personal beliefs could agree with him, and both of you would be justified in liking or disliking him. The same goes for L. It was a cool scenario, and it left fans on the edges of their seats wondering who would win. In this movie, Light and L have a grand total of two direct confrontations, and neither of them are particularly interesting or intense (L also reveals his face for no good reason, in a public café, where someone could snap a picture of him). One of these confrontations involves L holding a gun at Light and then getting knocked out by a Kira supporter, mind you.

Light Yagami was charming, deceptively good-looking, deeply perceptive, and subtle, careful to catch himself or cover his tracks (at first, anyway). He was a good fit for DN’s highly-intelligent universe. Light Turner is a malicious, snotty, entitled edgelord with a flat, inconsistent set of ideals and even flatter personality, with inconsistencies tenfold. Somehow we’re supposed to believe the kid that writes “decapitation” as his first kill is the same kid that hesitates to kill his daddy or any agents tracking Kira down. He’s a barely-human protagonist, given only the barest amount of personality traits and features to make us think he’s an actual human being with thoughts and ideas. And yet he still fares better than “Mia Sutton”, the film’s butchering of Misa Amane, who doesn’t even really have a legitimate reason for being a sociopathic, bloodthirsty bitch other than because Light needed a murderous love interest. She even winds up becoming a far more succinct murderer than Light, because apparently she’s the one that murdered the FBI Agents, and the one that murdered Watari (Watari fucking dies in this movie; I’ll get to that later), L’s caretaker and mentor. She has no drive, no rationale, no backstory; she’s just there to be a pair of tits, I guess. Mia’s a sadist that watches torture porn in her free time because yeah. She’s a fan of Light because he kills people and that gets her going, but we don’t ever really learn why.

the most of a motivation light ever gets, and it required a dead mother to even happen

The rest of the cast is pretty shoddily-written, too. The only vaguely interesting cast members are Ryuk and L, but even they have problems. Ryuk is pretty fun in this film from time to time, but he also gets a little bit too involved in this movie, which goes against his own policy of neutrality; he begins favoring Mia over Light, actively goads Light into his first murder instead of letting Light do it by himself, and shoots a laser beam or something at the support tower of a ferris wheel at the film’s climax because… some reason. L has the gift of a pretty decent actor, who has his gestures and general personality pretty down pat (a bit too twitchy and hot-blooded for my tastes, but I guess sugar does that to you), but this L’s backstory is fucked to hell and high water. All the lore about Wammy’s House, the Beyond Birthday case, the plot point that Watari is a genius and not just some guy that L trusts, is absolutely gone; instead we get some bullshit story about how L was actually part of a group of orphans and survived some kind of trial in a vault or something that proved his genius.

Also, Watari fucking dies. Apparently, Watari is his actual name here in the movie, and Light Turner utilizes a death note-controlled Watari to go and track down information about L’s real name. Interesting plot device, using Watari to snuff out L’s name. It almost was satisfying except for one little plot hole: Light only knows Watari’s first name, and in the brief shot that shows Light writing down his manipulative instructions for Watari in the notebook, only Watari’s first name is shown. Why did this work? In the show, you needed a full name and a matching face to murder someone. If that rule doesn’t apply here in the movie, then why didn’t Light just write down L’s name instead of going through all that trouble? This is an enormous problem, and it winds up serving absolutely no purpose except for giving L a motivation to angrily try and have Light killed, because we don’t even learn what L’s real name is in the movie anyway.

This isn’t the only plot hole in the movie. A brand new Death Note rule is introduced in the movie: burning a notebook page with a person's name on it will prevent his or her death, as long as it happens before the time of death. This can only be utilized once, and only once, though. Again, a very interesting addition! But the film handles it incredibly poorly. Light plans on burning Watari’s page after he reveals L’s name to him (which obviously fails because Watari fucking dies), but Mia reveals she couldn’t let Light burn Watari's page because she actually wrote down Light’s name and wants to burn his page so that she can get ownership of the note (Mia threatens to murder Light, something Misa Amane would never do). But if you're allowed one page-burning per owner, then Light would've been allowed to burn Watari’s page, and then Mia could have burnt Light's page when she became the owner of the notebook, so there was no need for Mia to remove the page. Also: why didn’t Light simply burn his own fucking page? If he was planning on burning Watari's page once he learned about L’s identity, he must have had a lighter on him (an edgelord like him assuredly would, and Mia smokes in this movie), and yet it never dawns on him to just burn the fucking page himself, and instead he relies on a plot involving, a fisherman, a doctor that eventually kills himself, and a fucking exploding ferris wheel set over a Chicago ballad. The film likes to think it’s smart and clever with these new ideas, but it handles them so poorly it just reverts back to being dumb.

The film isn’t all misery; in fact, the film has more than a few funny (likely unintentionally) moments. My personal favorite scene in the movie is when Light and Mia are very calmly having dinner with Light’s father, and then L appears out of fucking nowhere, waltzing into the shot and then perfectly vaulting into the chair across from Light like it’s absolutely normal. It’s a hilarious touch, very reminiscent of the L from the show. Light curtly telling Ryuk to “shut the fuck up” [sic] was really funny. Watari telling Light that he wants to sleep, even while under the influence of the Death Note, was fucking golden. Some of the deaths that Light instigates are so over-the-top gruesome and gory that they wind up being funny instead of shocking. L’s reaction to learning about Watari’s death – plothole garbage though it was – was actually very well-done, the sounds of his cellphone dropping from his hands and his anguished scream seconds later being completely muted. It’s really telling that the most interesting moment of sound direction in the movie was the part where there was no sound at all, but I digress. The film does have interesting color choices here and there, especially during the second half, when muted blues, pinks, reds, and yellows highlight the Seattle nightlife in an interesting, pulpy way. Also, Ryuk's CGI design is actually quite well-made and true to the show; it doesn't look awful in the slightest, and you can tell it's the aspect of the show the cast and crew put the most genuine effort into recreating.

And then there’s the matter of the ending, which… is honestly way more interesting than I thought it would be. I’m not gonna talk about it, see it for yourself, but it’s really telling that “death note film ending” (as of now, anyway) the first result you see when you type in “death note film” on google, instead of “death note film 2017”, or “death note film review”.

But honestly, these are just cherry-picked moments of decency from an otherwise pretty bad platter. I’ve even glossed over some of the dumber aspects of the movie, like how it handles the FBI Agents dying (they all jump off a building in perfect synchronization, which is hilarious), or how everyone has been Americanized and whitewashed to hell and back except for L and Watari for some fucking reason (who was an Englishman in the show), or how Light’s bully’s name is Kenny, or the entire fucking prom scene and its choice of “Take My Breath Away” (more 80’s) for the slow-dance tune, or even Light’s fucking “NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME” sticker he has plastered inside his locker (not even kidding, it’s there in a shot towards the movie’s second half). This film is a trainwreck through and through; it sucks, but it sucks in an entertaining way. DN was a show where you were forced to turn your brain on and watch; Death Note is a movie where you turn your brain off because nothing smart happens. Intrigue and thought and deductive reasoning are replaced by decapitations, edgelords, and High School Prom. This should be a joke; this would work better if it was some kind of amateur parody of DN. But no, mid-way through the film you start to realize this was actually the best the writers and director could do. The film isn’t offensively terrible per se; mostly, it’s just stupid. But unfortunately, “stupid” isn’t a word I’d use to describe DN. Eh, the first twenty-five episodes of DN.

Also Watari's name is pronounced Wuh-tarr-ee. Like Atari but with a Waluigi-esque "Wuh" replacing the "A". That pronunciation alone gives it a 10/10.

actual shot in the film; these are mass murderers

But there's no Matsuda in this movie. So: 4/10.

i wasn't kidding dude, LOOK