Film Review | Death Note (Adam Wingard) (2017)

This is, incredibly, the American film adaptation of the Japanese manga hit Death Note. Yes, this actually got made and produced. It's just a shame that it turned out the way it did.

Directed by Adam Wingard and written by Charles Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides, and upon Netflix's acquisition of the film, latest drafts and (presumably) finished film were written by Jeremy Slater.

Starred Nat Wolff as Light Turner, Margaret Qualley as Mia, Lakeith Stanfield as L, Shea Wigham as James Turner (Light's father), Paul Nakauchi as Watari, and Ryuk was portrayed in costume by Jason Liles and in voice by William Dafoe.

Music by Atticus Ross and Leopold Ross.

Based on Death Note, a manga which ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 2003 to 2006, written by Tsugumi Ohba and with art by Takeshi Obata.

I said at the beginning "It's a shame that it turned out like this." And, yes, I will freely admit to an element of clickbait there. But I stand by it as accurate, also. Where to begin? Well, this film isn't entirely awful. I will cover all the aspects I disliked before going into its positive qualities.

Firstly: a note for the readership.

• This review, while hopefully readable for a general audience, is aimed mainly at those who have already read the original Death Note manga or the anime adaptation.

Where to begin with what I disliked? Perhaps the first place to begin is with the adaptation itself - how it transferred to the manga to film.

It seems to me that this is about what you'd expect an American Death Note to be, if Americans had come up with the idea - it's an action movie, it's set in a high school, there's a romance. But if there Americans had come up with the idea, it would've been pulled off better, because it requires genius to come up with an idea like the death note. So, yes, it's the American adaptation.

It's massively compressed compared to the original. We barely get to see the death note at work, its impact on the world is far more minimal. The philosophical questions the manga brought up are left as implication, things that exist if you were to think about it, and never really emerge within the story itself.

Light's descent into madness and obsession is barely present. The change of Misa to Mia, and making her much more intelligent than in the original, is, at the very least, one of the good choices made by the writers. Turning her into someone who pushes the milder Light Turner to go farther dramatically shifts the focus of the story from the far more interesting cat-and-mouse game of Light and L - an aspect which loses all substance - to their romance.

Their romance, speaking of, is an interesting thing. I can't tell rather or not the writers mean for it to be cute or horrifying. It's played cute, but it seems horrifying to me: "maybe we can make some popcorn and put down some names?" (paraphrasing.) Ew.

Of L, he's transformed from independent reclusive detective to eccentric FBI agent. That's okay by me, honestly. If you're critiquing that, you're doing it wrong. So too is he given a more human side through his affection for Watari. This is, again, entirely okay by me - in fact, I think it's an excellent choice. Of all the choices made by the production team in adapting Death Note, and I was told to keep one of the changes, that's the one I would keep.

Another fascinating choice is to turn L's upbringing into something scarier - a half-dozen children locked in a vault for half a year, with those that retained their sanity being trained?! That's uniquely horrifying and adds a layer of emotional ambiguity to the "good guys". (In the original Death Note, there was still a layer of discomfort to Wammy's House, but nothing to the extent of locking children in a vault for half a year.)

While the many rules of the note make sense within the original manga, where they are continuously introduced over a period of time, within the film with its far more compressed timescale, it simply seems like the death note adopts whatever traits it needs to move the story to the ending the writers want. This is especially noticeable at the conclusion of the film with the complex plot for Light to survive: it's just a little bit deus ex machina (which, to be fair, is basically what the death note is) and the plot, while worthy of the original Light Yagami, is one I hesitate to believe the milder Light Turner could've come up with, much less followed through with so convincingly.

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The direction, by Adam Wingard, lands solidly competent. The montage of Light's speech about how he'll use the Death Note is quite neat, if wholly unoriginal. There's little that hits exceptional, but this is not a badly-directed film. The explicit, gory details of how some victims of the Death Note die (the decapitation especially) is utterly unnecessary, in my opinion. He is, at least, adept at switching from the sometimes schizophrenic moods the film takes on.

The visual effects are spectacular. The ferris wheel scene was extraordinary in that respect. The rendering of Ryuk is also absolutely stellar - he really does look like a death god come to life.

The music is unbelievably disappointing - I don't think they allotted any budget to it - as it consists wholly of dull synth pads, figures, and stabs and the occasional moment for piano. There's nothing resembling anything like a melody or theme here. It is a far, far cry from the rock, ambient, and ludicrously dramatic choirs and orchestra (often similar to Orff's Carmina Burana) of the anime adaptation.

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Of the performers: Paul Nakauchi brings great dignity to Watari, while William Dafoe excels as Ryuk.

Shea Wigham seems almost misplaced - he pulls off the lines with aplomb, but he looks a bit like a grown-up Joe Keery, and looks - physically looks - like he'd be more at home as sitcom dad. I definitely liked him better as detective and at the end in the hospital than when he was an angry father.

And we come to the three leading characters.

Margaret Quelley's performance as Mia is extremely solid and highly watchable, handling much of the emotional heft of the storyline and showing far greater range than anyone else. Even so, there's no single stand-out moment that says "star".

Nat Wolff as Light Turner is a little more faltering. In anger he is more akin to an angry, angsting teenager than a genuinely dangerous individual, which frequently undercuts moments of otherwise high tension.

And finally we come to what is, in my opinion, the best performance of the film: Lakeith Stanfield as L. This was a casting choice which, I imagine, shocked everyone. Even in the original (Japanese) manga, L was a white, British man. Changing him to an African-American was a daring choice.

It paid off spectacularly. Whether as a straight transfer of the original L in the first half of the film, or as the emotionally charged L of the second half, Stanfield's performance is absolutely excellent, sterlingly watchable. His care and anger about Watari's murder is very raw, while L's habit of squatting rather than sitting, such a noticeable, and often (intentionally) awkward eccentricity of the original, comes off now is just a mild quirk of being a genius. (An intelligent choice as a hyper-focus on it would've been, I believe, unpalatable as film and unpalatable to an American audience.)

I would go so far as to say that in the first half, as a straight transfer of the original to screen, he's as good as Alessandro Juliani in the original English dub. Watching Stanfield as L was far and away the highlight of the film, in my opinion, and I enjoyed it more than any other performance. And this is not to say that any of the other performers were poor - they weren't - merely that Stanfield is on a completely different level.

At the end of the day we have a relatively dull, heavily compacted action thriller, one slightly muddled and maybe a little incomprehensible to the general audience. The themes of the original Death Note have been abandoned. The supernatural element of the death note has been effectively dropped, the cat-and-mouse game between Light and L has disappeared, the philosophical implications of the original are never raised or really so much as hinted at.

Only two things truly stand out: a scene of Kira worshippers standing in a dark room, the name "KIRA" spelled out by candles (this is part of the speech montage mentioned earlier) which is a genuinely scary moment, and secondly, Lakeith Stanfield's unbelievably amazing performance as L.

It is an enjoyable enough film. But it's not really Death Note. It's Death Note-lite, as it were. Here is Light, there is L, over there the death note, and if you dim the lights, yes, it's Ryuk, but they don't look or talk or act quite the same. I was left disappointed. It's an enjoyable film. It does not quite manage being Death Note, though.

4.4 out of 10.

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I must seem horribly biased.

I loved the original Death Note. It is a brilliant idea: "The human whose name is written in this note shall die." What happens if we put this in the hands of a genius - what's more, what happens when we put it into the hands of an idealist?

But that's not all. We require opposition. Conflict drives story. So we have an eccentric detective, a genius of such mental abilities that within the Death Note canon he is the world's three greatest detectives: L, Deneuve, and Eraldo Coil. From there everything unfolds with a terrible inevitability, a funeral dirge, a requiem for a bright mind (or, maybe, just maybe, two bright minds?), the terrible aftershocks of someone playing god with human life and with morality.

(Even as complications arise and emerge from the woodworks - Misa, Yotsuba, L's successors - there is absolutely no way to tell a satisfying story here in which Light emerges victorious.)

What came first, I wonder? The brilliantly high-concept idea of the death note, or the less high-concept idea of setting a genius criminal against a genius detective? Either one of these ideas is enough to sustain a story.

(For those who don't know: everybody will tell you that "high-concept" is an idea which can be succinctly stated. In theory, this could mean "Godzilla vs. King Kong" is a high-concept idea. No! I disagree. A high-concept idea, in my definition, is an idea which is of such obvious genius that you can not believe you did not come up with it. It is an idea which "anyone" could have come up with. That they did not shows that it is not. For example: "what if we could clone dinosaurs?" "Creatures which, when observed by the human eye, are statues." And so on.)

But combining them? Putting them on the same team even as they both try and find out the "winning card" to defeat the other? We get a story which is better than either, something wholly unique, something that can't really be repeated.

As you can see, I loved Death Note. It's dramatic, shocking, and intelligent. It wasn't merely "good manga". We often describe things relative to others of their nature. This is all too often a way of denigrating it until the form it takes is considered art by consensus. "Good music" does not denigrate music. "Good film" does not denigrate film. Manga has not yet reached that point - "good manga" is good, relative to other, lesser manga.

So no - Death Note was not merely good manga. It just good. Brilliant. Genius, even. Wholly deserving of a far wider audience than it has thus far received. (It had its flaws: the sexism endemic to the shonen manga genre, but the magnificent scope of the concept essentially rendered this flaw however unfortunate as basically moot. It is worth noting that the writer's next project, Bakuman did not have such a high-concept idea, and further included more prominent female characters given more screen time over a longer period of time, and so the sexism [which, again, is already present in Death Note] comes through much, much harder.)

So I must seem horribly biased.

But Death Note is not the first thing I love to be adapted to film. It will not be the last. There is also the example of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell which was adapted from its book form to a seven-episode miniseries. Now that was an amazing adaptation - I shan't try and go into what made it great, suffice to say it was flawlessly casted, immaculately written, etc. etc.

Now, change is a necessary and vital part of adaptation. If you try to retain every last detail of the plot, you will fail. No. A good adapter knows what to remove and what to keep and still stay true to the original. (As something more known to a general audience - of the Harry Potter films, I point to Prisoner of Azkaban as the foremost example.)

So I want to try and make clear that I'm not disliking the Death Note film as an obsessive fan who wants every detail of the manga preserved. I dislike it as someone that was fully prepared to see the original changed, scenes cut, details changed, yet still staying true to the original.

This adaptation doesn't do that. It's muddled, messy, compacted. It changes far too many details of the original and drops others completely. The high-stakes cat-and-mouse between two geniuses is completely lost for - what? A teenage romance? The philosophy of humans playing god with men and morality is not even really hinted at. It exists, if you look and think about it, but it's not brought up. Once.

It is a poor adaptation of the original. I hope that I have made my case for that and I hope that my case for my opinion being founded on intelligent thought and not raving fanhood was convincing enough that my case for this being a poor adaptation can be taken seriously.

In the end, I remain disappointed. I am disappointed as a fan of the original, I am disappointed as someone who dearly wanted the original to see a greater audience, I am disappointed as someone who has seen good adaptations, has done some small amount of thought and how to adapt something well, and does not see a good adaptation here.

Oh well!

At least there is Lakeith Stanfield.