Review of Death Note (2017) by Shermos — 28 Aug 2017

Not bad, but not great. Very minor spoilers.

Based on review scores, I went into this expecting it to be another terrible adaptation of a popular anime, which Western film makers are infamous for. I was pleasantly surprised. It's hardly a 10/10 film of course, but the visual style was pleasant to my taste and fairly true to what I remember of the source material. I was most impressed with Ryuk, the death god. , and I thought the acting was decent at its worst moment. The plot suffered from trying to condense too much into one movie and without having read any in detail reviews yet, I suspect this is where most people have issues with the film. They weren't bad enough to completely break the film for me. I suspect fans of the anime are putting it on too high a pedestal. They seem to forget it had problems itself. The entire second half sucked.

Edit: Having read through several of the negative reviews, I can see a major gripe was the adaptation having a different plot from the original. I have no problem with this as long as the spirit of the original is captured, and I think it basically is. The core message of Death Note is that you can't make the world perfect. There is always some kind of catch, a lesser evil, or a cloud in every silver lining. I also see a lot of criticisms of how the characters were written and of the plot. These are legitimate, but I stand by my original argument that fans are being too hard on the adaptation and looking at the source material through the rose coloured glasses of nostalgia.