To say I’m a fan of Death Note may be an understatement (I’ve
even named my dogs after two of the characters who are missing in the American
adaptation). I’ve seen most of the Death Note media that I could find, so I
feel like I’m in a good position to write this review. I wish I could say that
I enjoyed this adaption, but I’m going to be joining the pretty much every
other reviewer on the internet in hating it. I’ve read somewhere that this
adaption of Death Note is supposed to focus more on the notebook and less on
the characters so I will start there. The notebook is barely used. It is shown
that there are a ton of rules, most of which don’t exist in the anime, but no
one ever goes into detail about any of them. Light is shown reading the rules
but he doesn’t bother to explain anything (even when he tells Mia that there
are a lot of rules). In the anime there is a scene where Light explains that he
wrote his own rules in the notebook to benefit him when the police obtained it,
but nothing of that nature happened here. In fact, some of the original rules
were ignored, like the cause of death not being written became ‘dealer’s choice’.
There were entries from past owners, and the more I watched the more I wished
that I was watching some of their stories instead. Now I will move on to the
rest of what I had issues with. First, Light had to be forced to use the Death
Note. Why was he given a Death Note in the first place? It was clear that he
was only using it to please Mia. He also decided that he wanted to be called
Kira, and that’s why he drew police attention. No one gave a second thought to
his crimes before he used the name Kira. That’s another problem I had with the
movie, no one figured things out the way they were supposed to. L seemed to
figure out that Light was the killer after doing almost no research. The
characters weren’t believable and did not behave in ways they should have, like
L exposing himself to Light as soon as he met him, Mia got in a relationship
with Light because he used to stare at her creepily when she was at cheerleader
practice, etc. Ryuk may have only been on screen for a total of five minutes,
which annoyed me. He told Light that he wasn’t like his dog, which was practically
the only thing similar to the anime. Ryuk wasn’t Light’s friend, he wasn’t
there to help him, and he was only along for the ride. This time he didn’t seem
to have a notebook of his own and barely anything was explained about him.
There was a scene where Light was looking at a book that had a picture of Ryuk,
but he closed it without letting us learn anything about him. L was also a big
problem for me. He acted more like an emotional breakdown than a character. He
was always let his feelings guide him, even if it meant putting himself/his job
in danger. He wasn’t the intelligent character for the anime, and it was hard
to watch him eat candy. The movie basically ignored everything about Death Note
and tried to make something similar to the Suicide Squad. The closest thing
this resembles is the Death Note tv series, but even that isn’t close to what
this mess is.
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