Death Note is an anime series that I only recently watched. It’s a series that I overall really enjoy despite feeling as though it dropped off in the back end. Despite that however, I saw that there was enough there that I felt a good movie could be made from.

There is only one way to sum up the Death Note Netflix movie, it is just straight up awful. Whether I view it as an adaption of the source material, or just as an original movie, it doesn’t change the overall quality if it.

Starting on the adaptation point of view, this adaptation failed to catch the aspect of the anime that I myself really enjoyed. I had three aspects that I felt like they had to get right and that was the relationship between Light and Ryuk, the battle of wits between Light and L and the legend of Kira.

In this film Ryuk served close to no purpose apart from give some early explanation and just hang around in the background. The character of Ryuk in this film seemed more like a version of a devil rather than a smart ass death god like in the anime. If I do have to give some credit to Ryuk in this film, it would be that William Dafoe really nailed the voice. Going into the film I had no doubt that his voice was perfectly suited for the role, however they didn’t even get close to using the character to it’s full potential.

Moving onto the battle of wits between Light and L, it was basically non-existence. While there was a few moments that they showed that L had a form of intelligence in catching Kira, I never felt like L could realistically work out all the information he knew just from doing what he had done on screen.

The legend of Kira was one of my favourite parts of the anime, however it was one of my least favourite parts of the film. Kira as a concept worked in the anime because it was a community given name that Light took on. He filled the void of a god that the community had asked for. Where in the film, it is Light that decides he wants to be known as Kira and because of that it changes the meaning around Kira. Kira is no longer a savour that the community worship but a guy that just wants to toots his own horn.

Stepping back from the point of view of an adaptation, this film still had to work as a film and sadly it didn’t. We had an extremely forces romantic plot line that had no chemistry at all. Majority of the acting was really flat, which is both on the actors and actresses as well as the dialog and director. The overall story felt really rushed and most of the time I only was able to understand what they were trying to do is because they had hand picked moments from the anime. The moments they did pick from the anime often lost their meaning and context because they had not been present in the way the anime had.

After watching this film I went back and refreshed myself on how the story is structured in the anime, which made me dislike this film more. In the first two episodes of the anime they establish Kira as this community built belief, they form a great back and forth relationship with Light and Ryuk, and they gave a strong introduction to L and had a great display of L playing mind games with Light. That was all in the first 40 minutes of the series. While I know all adaptation don’t have to be completely accurate, I felt that the concepts and set up done by the anime in 40 minutes was much more stronger than what the film managed to do in an hour and a half.

Overall, while I wasn’t too excited for this film based off the trailers, I was still intrigued enough to see what they could do with the source material. What is so disappointing is that it was not only a massive disservice to the source material, but was a disservice to film making itself that what little moments of good the film did have barely shone through the cracks.

3/10