Review of Death Note (2017) by Beapo — 29 Aug 2017

Hollywood shows again that they are the best in messing up a popular anime. Death Note reminds me of the dragon ball or street fighter movies which were no where near the real anime.

The death note normally has only 5 rules written in it everything else Light finds out himself by testing and asking ryuk. In the movie the death note contains over 100 rules.

The main character "Light" should be a very intelligent guy who doesn't care about the feelings of other people nor is he interested in having a girlfriend. He is a very popular guy that everybody respects because he always finds the right words to say to the people to like him. He is a very athletic guy who is good in pretty much every sport and he is also really good at fighting because his original goal was to get a high position in the police.

Hollywood ripped this interesting character off and made him to a typical highschool student that is very uncomfortable with other people. The only thing they kept was that he is good in school (at least he does the homework for other people which actually doesn't have to mean he is good in school), he isn't able to fight nor is he able to seduce every girl like he did in the anime. He is a coward who gets scared pretty easily (he got very scared when he saw ryuk and didn't know who he is and what he wants while in the anime he got scared cause ryuk was sneaking up on him but he already knew who he is an what he wants. Also he gets shocked when he sees someone die while in the anime he didn't care about that because he is already a part of the police so he already saw many corpses) and overall he doesn't seem to be a very intelligent person because he takes the death note out wandering around so that people can see him reading it. As soon as a girl saw him reading the book he told her everything about the book. In the anime Light rarely took the book outside of his room nor did he tell anyone about it.

In the anime I was always astonished how Light was able to figure out every single step "L" is going to do while in the movie I am astonished of how dumb he is compared to the anime version.

I had mixed feelings about the anime Light cause of him being a emotionless, high intelligent person he gave me a feeling that he is a psychopath and after all it should be all about him being a psycho who wants to be a god that decides who lives and who dies. In the movie you get a psychopathic vibe just for a minute when you see all the people he killed and he says he wants to be called a god afterwards he acts kind of normal again.

L also doesn't seem to be as intelligent as in the anime. In the anime watari does every task for L because L doesn't leave the hotel he is staying at to not expose himself. His way of finding out in which city kira(Light) is living and how he kills people is also way more interesting than in the movie and it wouldn't need more time to explain it so they can't use time as an excuse for that.

In the anime Kira started experimenting with his targets (about 10 people) so he can see what he can make them do and what not and afterwards he decided to kill all his victims with heart attacks so people know that those criminals were killed by Kira. This is the reason why everybody thought that Kira can only kill people with an heart attack and because of that he was sort of able to cover his tracks from L. In the movie Kira was killing over 400 people in many different ways but he wasn't killing anyone with a heart attack which made this cat and mouse game pretty boring.

Although I wrote so much it is only a little inside of what was wrong with the movie. There are way more flaws that made me upset because the anime was actually perfectly filled with excitement for the whole time while the movie got boring from time to time. What made me the most upset was that they changed some rules of the book:

1. Touching the book makes the Shinigami(Ryuk) visible for the person. (not a rule in the film).

2. You only lose the ownership of the book when you say you give up your ownership to the Shinigami and afterwards you lose your memory. (In the movie you lose your ownership after being seperated from the book for 7 days).

3. If the death of someone written in the book would cause someone else to die, the victim will die of an heart attack (In the film someone killed himself with a grenade while people were around him and they probably also died).

4. Once you write someone in the book he will be killed no matter what. (In the film you can apparently save only one person by burning the page he was written in).

There are way more rules they changed or ignored. The 2 day rule is actually a 23 day rule and them not using "The eyes" was also kind of sad.

In the end this movie is a disaster for all Death Note fans and not exciting enough for people that don't know about Death Note. The actors was also bad cause he shouldn't give away anything with his facial expression but he failed at it horribly.