Death Note (2017)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Light Turner (Nat Wolff), a bright student, stumbles across a mystical notebook that has the power to kill any person whose name he writes in it. Light decides to launch a secret crusade to rid the streets of criminals. Soon, the student-turned-vigilante finds himself pursued by a famous detective known only by the alias 'L' (Lakeith Stanfield).
- Actors:
- Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley, Shea Whigham, Willem Dafoe, Jason Liles, Paul Nakauchi, Jack Ettlinger, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Chris Britton, Timothy Lambert, Kwesi Ameyaw, Justin Stone, Christian Sloan, Artin John, Tony Ali, Anousha Alamian, David S. Jung, Jessica McLeod, Michelle Choi-Lee
- Directors:
- Adam Wingard
- Writers:
- Charley Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides
- Genres:
- Action & Adventure, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers
- Collections:
- Top 10 World Cinema Remakes
More like Death Note
Reviews (1) of Death Note
Misguided adaptation - Death Note review by RT
Version I saw: Netflix stream
Actors: 6/10
Plot/script: 4/10
Photography/visual style: 7/10
Music/score: 5/10
Overall: 5/10
By the time I saw this film on the second day of release, it was already getting very bad word-of-mouth. Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's original manga and the anime adaptation are both widely considered to be high-water marks of their forms, so it seemed an obvious choice for Netflix, and indeed only a matter of time, but...
Many of the changes it makes are entirely reasonable, and I have no argument with them. Transplanting the action to America, renaming characters, all par for the course. However, the more subtle changes betray that the director and writers did not have a clue what they had.
At its heart, Death Note is a competition of elaborate mind games between two beguiling but amoral genius psychopaths, Light Yagami and the mysterious investigator L. Genius chess, if you will, but with lives on the line. Director Adam Wingard and writers Charley and Vlas Parlapanides and Jeremy Slater reframed their Light Turner as a clever but awkward, emotionally wrought teenager. This might seem like an understandable decision, to make him relatable to a western audience... but that would be fundamentally missing the point of Death Note! We end up with something that is a lot more generic, and a lot more mediocre.
There is a lot of good and a lot of bad in the adaptation. Willem Dafoe is superbly cast as the demonic Ryuk, and some of the plot developments are indeed fairly clever. It's visually pretty stylish too, with plenty of visual flair that feeds into the emotional tone from the outset. On the other hand, the soundtrack is very cheesy, and there are some daft decisions regarding props and set dressing too.
To be good on balance, a film has to have more good than bad, and this Death Note adaptation simply doesn't. For every good detail or element - and there are plenty of them - it has something rubbish. I can't recommend it at all.
For my full review, see my independent film blog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno: https://cinemainferno-blog.blogspot.com/