THIS POST MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
August 25th finally arrived and with it came the Netflix version of Death Note, a re-imagined U.S. offering of the Japanese manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata.
I'll say upfront that I'm a huge fan of the original manga and the animated series. I also enjoyed the 2006 Japanese live action films. When I heard that Netflix were going to release a new Death Note movie, I can honestly say that I had something else in mind to what was delivered.
I tried to stay away from internet discussions that may have swayed my impressions of this film before I got to watch it. In saying that, I discovered that they had kept the characters from the original manga but changed their names for a western audience. This information was a bit of a shock but I was hoping that they would stay true to the story seeing as they were using original characters. Oh how wrong I was...
In great anticipation, I sat down, booted up Netflix and pressed play on the shiny new Death Note offering. From the time the intro had finished, I knew it wasn't what I was expecting. I continued on watching getting more disappointed as the film went on.
So Light (Turner) seems to have been chosen by Ryuk to wield this powerful notebook. As to why this is the case it is not made very clear except that Ryuk is now somewhat psychopathic and hell bent on seeing Light become a murderer. I really liked the original Ryuk as he had a sense of fun about him and dropped his notebook in the human realm just for shits and giggles! Ryuk introduces Light to his first death by way of suggestion in which a bully gets decapitated 'Final Destination' style. I'm not sure that Ryuk's actions are in the spirit of the original manga!
Apparently Light's mum has been murdered which gives Light his first insight how to really use the Death Note where he kills his mothers murderer. It's a bit of a shallow story just to give Light a reason to try the Death Note, it seemed very cheesy to me. Light's character development didn't seem quite true to the original story but by now nothing is really like the original. It seems like the production team just kept the names and some references to annoy the fans of the original!
Which brings me to the other characters Mia (Misa) and L. Not much I can say about these two except "terrible". I'm not even going to go into the rest of the film as I have more questions than criticisms! Questions like:
- Why is there now 90+ rules in the Death Note??
- Why does Light have to write a cause of death?
- Why not just make this a new occurrence of a Death Note landing in the human realm? Why bastardize the original? I think this would have been a better outcome for the makers of the film.
- Why has Ryuk turned into such a tool?
- Does the ending lend itself to a sequel of this rubbish?
- Why did I force myself to watch the whole thing?!
I would love to hear other peoples thoughts on the Netflix Death Note.
Maybe you even enjoyed it!