Sometimes, being right sucks.
A little while ago, I finally watched Netflix' adaptation of Death Note. Going in, I had nothing in the way of expectations - if you read my entry regarding my reactions to the teaser I did a few months ago, you know exactly what I assumed this movie was going to be. Not only were my predictions entirely vindicated, but the film, somehow, managed to be even worse than it lead me to believe. The only appropriate reaction one can have after witnessing such a colossal failure of an adaptation is precisely the one I used to name this post: What the hell happened?
To be frank, answering that question is going to require scrutinizing virtually every aspect of the film, so let's start at the beginning. I won't go into too much detail setting up the plot (read my previous post for any relevant plot details), but one thing that bears repeating is that the creative team decided to alter the setting from Tokyo to Seattle - more specifically, a Seattle high school. I stand by my previous opinion that this change, in itself, isn't a negative one, and that Death Note as a story-concept is universal enough to work in any setting. But the change of setting was more than just a superficial one, and that's where the problems come in - in transferring Death Note to a Seattle high school, the creative team seems to have decided that the characters should be altered to stereotypical American high school students, and in the process they ruined everything positive about them.
Let's start with Light. I describe Light Yagami to be, though the analogy isn't a 1 to 1 correlation, the Japanese equivalent of Walter White - though he uses the Death Note, originally, with somewhat noble intentions, fairly quickly it unleashes within him a latent sociopathy that completely dominates his character for the rest of the story. In Death Note 2017, we instead have Light Turner, who aside from having perhaps the stupidest name in any movie of the past ten years, is an obnoxious kid with daddy issues. His mother died in a hit and run accident, and he holds his father, a higher-up in the Seattle police department, in contempt for never bringing her killer to justice. This, presumably, is where Light Turner's drive to use the Death Note comes from, and while it is something, is far from equivalent to Light Yagami's more philosophical, quasi-religious, and outright terrifying sense of right and wrong.
Moving on, we have Mia Sutton, the film's equivalent to Misa Amane. Say what you will about Misa Amane - while many people find her girly personality and her sycophantic worship (pun intended) of Light as obnoxious, it works, because I'm sure that's how Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note's author, intended her to be. She was a well-written character in spite of those annoyances. Mia Sutton, on the other hand, may be the most bafflingly incoherent character in the movie. Aside from one very brief scene in the beginning when she selflessly confronts a group of bullies, we don't know who she is at all. We're told she's a cheerleader, but aside from the bullying scene I already mentioned, that's the extent of it. Everything else we see regarding Mia concerns her partnership with Light - we can see she has an obvious zeal for Kira's mission, and she acts as an almost Lady Macbeth to Light's Macbeth, but where does that zeal come from? We are given no context, and thus given no reason to care.
Then, there's Ryuk, the Shinigami who becomes Light's companion throughout his diabolical experiment. The manga portrays him as an embodiment the idea of Chaotic Neutral - the entire reason, for instance, why the Death Note winds up on Earth at all is because he (correctly) believes that throwing it into the hands of a random human will alleviate his boredom. In the film? He's simply the Mephistopheles to Light's Dr. Faust. I'm not suggesting that drawing on the Faust mythos is inherently negative - we have hundreds of years of brilliant works of art to counter such as assumption - but the movie does nothing interesting with those Faustian archetypes. It almost felt like Ryuk was rewritten as Mephistopheles simply because that archetype would be more recognizable to a western audience, integrity of the original character be damned.
Anyone who's at all familiar with Death Note will probably find it odd that I have yet to mention one of the series' most famous characters: L. That's because - and this is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this film - L barely has any purpose in the film. Yes, you heard that right - the character who, in the manga, was probably second only to Light in terms of influence and popularity, is, in this film, so criminally mishandled that his presence is almost negligible. Let me explain.
Sure, I suppose L, unlike the other principal characters, is most like his manga counterpart: he's still the brilliant, eccentric detective who's brought in to assist the police department in catching a criminal who is head and shoulders above anything they're capable of dealing with. Some reviews of the film I've read complain that the movie transformed him from an autistic idiot-savant into a more two (one?) dimensional quirky asshole - there is truth to that, but honestly, that's the least of our problems. L's startling intelligence was only one facet of his character - most important, I would argue, was his incredible game of cat and mouse he played with Light in his quest to discover the identity of Kira. Simply put, this was the reason why most people read Death Note, and it just doesn't happen in this film. L figures out that Kira is Light almost immediately, and the one noteworthy interaction between the two happens when the two meet up in a diner, where Light has no problem admitting his identity himself.
I know what you're thinking. They took away the Light vs. L chase? That basically was Death Note! If the movie isn't going to be that, then what is it going to be? The answer, basically, is a clusterfuck.
Simply put, Death Note is, at a minimum, three films in one, all of them awful. Since I just spent some time on why it failed as a thriller, I'll move on to why it failed as a horror film, since, above all, I think that's what the creative team was attempting to make. The director, Adam Wingard, is a horror director - not being much of a horror fan, I haven't seen any of his other works. I have heard from basically everyone that his adaptation of The Blair Witch Project was awful, though his earlier works tend to receive praise, so maybe he does have at least some talent. Maybe. But it doesn't show here.
We're introduced to Ryuk, for instance, via a shitty jump scare scene, complete with what is perhaps the most cringe-worthy scream in the history of cinema.
Yeah, not only did a group of editors think it wise not to leave that on the cutting room floor, but a group of Netflix producers said, sure, this is something we feel proud to release to consumers. It gets worse - instead of, as in the manga, focusing on Light's struggles to remain hidden while executing his vengeance, the film spends that time focusing, in excruciating detail, on the deaths of Light's victims. Every single one of them is given a shitty, slow-motion death scene, complete with what seems like gallons of blood and, on at least one occasion, bodily organs flying everywhere. Wingard directs these scenes like he's filming a live-action adaptation of a Mortal Kombat fatality - that may work in Mortal Kombat, where gruesome spectacle is its raison d'etre, but it's fundamentally inappropriate for an adaptation of Death Note.
Besides being inappropriate, the scenes completely fail at being scary. We know the victims are going to die - we just have to wait for it to happen. There's no horror here - at best, the scenes invoke a sense of morbid curiosity with regards to the exact nature of the victim's demise. But again, violent visual spectacle isn't what Death Note is about, and if Wingard had any sort of artistic awareness, he should have known that.
The last paragraph brings up another good point regarding why this film fails as both a horror film and a thriller. The two genres are connected in that each, for their own ends, requires the manipulation of fear and tension to achieve an effect on the audience. That's the fundamental principle of the genres, and it's incredible that Wingard, a horror director, seems to not understand how either fear or tension is manifested. Both require the unknown - you can't be afraid of something if you know what it is or what it's doing, and you can't feel tense if you know what's coming. Neither of those effects are achieved in this film, because Wingard has created a film where the rules governing its world ensure that they can't happen.
Case in point: the Death Note itself. Like in the manga, there are rules governing its use, most famously the rule stating you need to know the real name of the person you want to kill. Light, obviously, can't kill L because L isn't his real name, so a good portion of the film sees him trying to discover that name. Luckily for him, however, the Death Note's rules are such that they eventually allow him to force L's retainer, Watari, into completely abandoning his post, ignore all his calls, retreat to an orphanage where L was raised, sift through the archives of that orphanage to find L's real name, read it to L, and then, after all that, kill himself.
Can you see why this is so awful? The Death Note can't kill anyone without a real name, but if you have that name, you can more or less subject them to absolute mind control. Once Watari is under Light's command, we know exactly what's going to happen, and it does. High-determinism is the antithesis of both horror and thriller, in that there can exist no tension in a set of events that is absolutely preordained.
Embarrassingly, the film's romance plot almost functions better than its horror/thriller plot, and its romance plot is really shitty. What saves it is that, as shitty as it is, it isn't a complete failure of logic like the horror elements are. How ironic is it that Wingard, A HORROR DIRECTOR, let me remind you, gets his romance right more consistently than his horror?
Anyway.
The romance: Mia falls in love (lust?) with Light, because he's a badass megalomaniacal god of vengeance, and wouldn't you know it, righteous indignation happens to be her kink. The issue, of course, is that by the middle of the film, Light starts to have doubts, while Mia, channeling Lady Macbeth, attempts to keep the Kira-spirit alive within him. Like I mentioned before: Light never becomes the Walter White-esque monster he does in the manga. I don't know why - maybe that would have made the film too dark or inaccessible to a certain portion of its audience. In any case - it's obvious that Mia doesn't really love Light, she loves Light-As-Kira. Something could be done with this, but as I said in the beginning, Mia's character is such a blank slate that one can't comprehend what it is that drives her. It makes the romance feel hollow, like another checked box on the list of things Adam Wingard thinks will make the movie popular with clueless high school students across America.
That brings me to what I'm arbitrarily going to make my final point. Wingard's worst, and far and away his most baffling, directorial decision is his four or five times in the film that, for whatever reason, he decides to film the movie like a music video. By this, I mean that these scenes feature, minimal, if any, dialogue, instead composed almost entirely of slow-motion scenes of characters doing dramatic things while 80s music from what I assume was taken from the cutting room floor of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive plays obnoxiously in the background.
There are a few issues here - I'll start with the choice of music itself. This kind of synthwave, 80s throwback, call it what you will, is undeniably popular, but in this movie, again, it is entirely inappropriate. Honestly, I don't think I can recommend an adequate replacement, because literally no style of music would be appropriate. Michael Jackson's Thriller notwithstanding, when was the last time you were watching a horror film and thought, wow, this could really use a music video? It's such an embarrassment to rational thought that it's almost impressive.
What's worse, Wingard chooses to incorporate these music video scenes in the absolute worst parts of the film. Literally the first scene of the film is a music video. So is the climax, which is so badly shot that the death of a major character caused me to burst out laughing for nearly ten seconds. That's how I remember the end of the movie.
This post has gone on for long enough, so I'll conclude by saying this. I knew I wasn't going to like this film. But Death Note has, beyond all expectations, managed to become the single most surprising film I've seen this year. It is so astonishingly inept in its construction, so blind to the logical tenets of horror and thriller filmmaking, that I'm suddenly not even that angry that it's managed to ruin one of the greatest anime and manga series of the 21st Century. Death Note will unquestionably become a touchstone on how not to adapt an anime series - I hope this blog has convinced you that it should also become a touchstone on how not to make a film in general.
