"Death Note" (2017) - Review

Be Calm Death Note Fans, Don't Write This Film's Name Down

Alright people. I have thoughts on the Netflix Death Note movie. If this post seems a bit rambling, it's because it started as a Facebook post and graduated to being a full on post on my formerly dormant blog. Lucky you I guess.



Before I say what I thought about the Death Note movie, I need to address the obvious. Yes, I have seen the original anime, but years ago. The common thing I'm seeing on my Facebook and around the internet is how upset people are that it is not like the anime. People have a very difficult time viewing things on their own merit when there is a previous source or another successful adaptation of that source. They either hate it on principle because the other adaptations do certain things better, or they just hate it for being different. To counter this, I must reiterate just how important it is to view a work as its own entity separate from what it is based on. Some of the greatest movie adaptations ever made have been completely different from their source. They just take a basic idea and do a new take on it that works as a feature film. Sure, it may alienate the small fraction of the audience that wants to see a non-surprising beat-for-beat translation of one medium to another, but that is never what I wanted.

When the producers of this new Death Note movie announced that they were taking the concept of Death Note and were moving it to Seattle, Washington, I was excited to see a brand new take on the material. I wanted to see how self-entitled Facebook era American teens would react to being given the power to kill anonymously by a God of Death. Given how much of society is lived anonymously online under different created aliases now, I thought this would be an amazing new avenue into the Death Note mythos. The anime is always going to exist to tell that original, and specifically Japanese, story. To be honest, I have a lot of problems with the anime, particularly in the back half. It runs out of plot and relevance, but then has an awesome ending that almost makes up for it. If only a couple of characters in the major whole of the anime were not so grating as to drag it down for me, I would forgive some of that for the fact that so much of the anime is so fascinating with its take on the classical power struggle story that we see in film and literature so often.

With that said, I loved the first 30 minutes of the American Death Note adaptation. No joke. It is not perfect, but the filmmakers took the Death Note concept and gave it a treatment that reminded me of Evil Dead and Final Destination, but with a stylistic approach comparable to when Adam Wingard directed his previous surprise critical hit The Guest. The moment I saw the first death in it spectacularly hilarious and shockingly gory glory, I was completely hooked. They had fun showing the falling domino process of each death being orchestrated and then gave amazingly stylish and bloody pay offs. I thought this was going to be a darkly humorous and Gothic high school movie with the haunted blood and gore of Evil Dead. As for a new take on Death Note that is different from the anime, I loved that. However, as I was enjoying my guilty pleasure, I wished that the movie would slow down just a tad bit and take more time with the character beats that it was introducing and perhaps have some more ghoulish and bloody fun with the high school setting.

Then the 30 minute mark happened and the film decided to go full steam ahead by only slightly grazing certain major plot points by way of montage. If you know the source, they essentially decided to go back to being the original story, but completely abbreviated so that after this montage, it is a completely different movie with different stakes. This is where I feel like we fast forwarded through the first movie of an amazingly fun trilogy, skipped the ending of it, and then started the second film. This second film only had around an hour to exist and conclude itself.

Death Note was adapted by Charley Parapanides, Vlas Parlapanides, and Jeremy Slater according to IMDb. To be honest, I feel for them. They felt the pressure to adapt a whole series into one film, which is a misguided idea to begin with. Does The Last Airbender ring a bell for anyone? I'm sorry if I awakened some buried trauma for any of you, but it has to be said that Hollywood production studios should know better by now. While Death Note is nowhere near the travesty that "Airbender" was, it reeks of the same issue of cramming way too much material into one single film. But unlike the previously mentioned dumpster fire of cinematic trash, the direction is confident and infectious. Adam Wingard takes this fatally flawed script and gives it all he has. The film looks gorgeous and it moves with a brisk pace. The score by Atticus Ross and Leopold Ross has echos of 80's and 90's horror, while providing some modern hooks that convey the edgy tone of the film. There is some excellent craft at display, especially those gory deaths, which most of them are accomplished with sickeningly awesome practical effects. It is such a shame that there are not more of these scenes. A better first film in a Death Note film franchise would have kept it small at first and focused in the high school setting, before becoming a more globe-trotting story. Again going to the point of the last two-thirds essentially being movie number 2 in a trilogy, the film ends with an excellent cliffhanger that would have perfectly set up a third and final film. There is so much potential here, but the film is doomed by its compressed and rushed structure. Even reveals involving the rules of this world, and a certain demonic presence played perfectly by Willem Dafoe, suffer from this pace by appearing unmotivated and hackneyed when it could have been achieved with more careful plotting.

This is a hot mess of a film, but with plenty of elements of a great film (or 3) in it, most of which come from director Adam Wingard's eye for stylistically twisted filmmaking. There are also some standout performances by Willem Dafoe and Lankeith Stanfield (whose L portrayal is completely spot on for a good majority of the film). People that say that this is a terrible movie are being irrational and reactionary about a decent, if not entirely great, film just because they cannot separate it from an anime series that has a very passionate fan following. Keep your mind open and view the film on its own terms. It may not be the best thing you've ever seen, but you may find some guilty pleasure in this Death Note movie. I know I did. I just wish there were more of it.

Grade: C+

Death Note is now streaming on Netflix.