Death Note: Not Quite Edition
Sep. 28th, 2021 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerSo, I'd seen the reviews and was not going to watch Death Note 2017, but a roommate wanted to watch it, and once it queued up I started laughing and was like, "Wait, this one?" I pretty much knew all the major plot points, but some things were better watching and some were not. I will have spoilers, though the very beginning is fairly spoiler-lite and I clearly state where that will change.
*Casting. I don't think there was a single casting decision I disagreed with. Lakeith Stanfield did a brilliant job as L--he's got all the quirks down pat. Paul Nakauchi's Watari is slightly more of a nuanced, quirky presence (seriously, he can do both dignified and slightly more possibly-yakuza presence and uses a gun and that was cool). Willem Dafoe as Ryuk was pitch-perfect and a delight every time he showed up on screen. Beta-Senpai and I also flipped out when we saw Masi Oka on screen, even if it was just a cameo (Hiro from Heroes!!). And it's fascinating that he was also a producer. (Supposedly, I also shortly before missed seeing a much older Cigarette Smoking Man, but I missed seeing CSM. Which...just looked it up, yes, it absolutely was him. Interesting.) Apparently they also had Soichiro Yagami's English VA for a bit, too, but we completely missed that. Still. Some fun cameos there too.
EDIT: I would like to add that while I've seen a lot of 'they were bad actors/miscast' in other reviews, it looked like it was a lot more just bad direction and a bad script. If you're trapped within bad direction and a bad script, there's only so much you can do even as a great actor.
*Music. The soundtrack for most of it, while not Tanuichi Hideki and Yoshihisa Hirano, was great. I will probably listen to it by itself. Except for after the dance. Then they just started using songs with lyrics in wildly inappropriate times and places that completely undercut the tension and seriousness of the scenes. I'm fairly sure that they got the rights for all those songs, didn't have the time to squish them all in that scene, and just decided to use them in other places throughout the movie. The worst part is that it undercuts the finale, although the finale is a bit of a jumbled mess in the first place.
*Some scenes: The scene at the beginning with him cheating for other students was supposed to be showing he's intelligent. It did do that. It didn't do anything to convince me he's clever or set up the ending, though. Because he gets caught. Light Yagami would not get caught, even if he'd been on the bad end of a fight. (Also, I'm not entirely sure if they were setting up something about handwriting with him, because to me it looked like the second name he wrote was completely different than his usual handwriting. So it might've been cool if they showed that he could mimic handwriting, and maybe if they followed my fix, it could be used as, I dunno, some way to show, once they got their hands on the notebook, that this isn't just one kid doing this. It's a death cult or something. He could even have planted the notebook on someone else if the cops were getting close, and his handwriting wouldn't be anywhere in the thing. It's not like they could prove anything using Ryuk, since in this version you can't see the Shinigami unless you're the owner. Which should take seven days, unless there's some rule about relinquishing the Death Note that we didn't see.
On the other hand, there was a scene in the café where Light is looking at pictures of Ryuk and he's in, say, samurai gear and stuff, and it seems to be drawn in Obata's style and that was amazing. I want more of that, please. It was all the better because it was apropos of nothing. Like, they didn't frame it as Light trying to do research on how to kill Gods of Death or anything. It was just like...yeah, okay, these pictures are amazing, but how and why are you looking at that? What, did Ryuk do a photography session and stick the results in the front pages of the Death Note? What is happening? It was hilarious, though, full points for that.
I don't know how to feel about the Cultist Ex Machina.
I did notice the torture porn there, Mia.
They did also acknowledge how abusive Wammy's was, although, again, not in a way that made sense (pushing intelligent kids hard enough that one of them committed suicide and the others had their own neuroses years after the fact, sure, throwing them in a vault for seven months and seeing if they survive, what was the point there??)
Beta-senpai made a joke about 'losing his marbles' when Ryuk first showed up, and yep. Yep, I think that part of the scene was entirely scripted for that pun.
*Cinematography: Really well done, from the color to the angles to the framing of the scenes. It really created a sense of atmosphere and spectacle that almost worked. They were definitely a lot bloodier in showing the deaths.
*Writing: This is where the movie fails. It's *okay*, but this isn't the intellectual tennis match. Sure, okay, so other people can't see Ryuk if they touch the Death Note, okay, you still probably don't want to have it out in the middle of gym class. What if you switch up the notebooks as you're taking notes in class? Yagami wouldn't make that mistake, but I could see Turner doing that. They don't really show Light or L getting that many intellectual victories, and it feels a whole lot like they're taking a stand on what justice is, rather than the entire series posing the question. There are also issues with vague rules and worldbuilding. I'll probably going to go over this in more detail in the points below and those will definitely have more direct spoilers.
**SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS**
*Intelligent Game of Cat-and-Mouse/Tennis Match: Mostly lacking. This is a big deal and one of the key points as it's one of the draws to the series. They tried to write Light as the clever mastermind orchestrating everything at the end. I don't buy it, because they didn't spend any time setting that up. Being intelligent is not the same thing as being clever! In other words, Book Smarts are not the same thing as Street Smarts, and they didn't give us any time showing Turner was anything other than Book Smart. You don't bring evidence that could put you on death row or in jail to school. You definitely don't show it to a girl to try to get laid. You also think 'hmm, maybe the girl I just had an argument with about whether to use the notebook, went up to my room alone, grabbed a book and is putting that book in her backpack and wants to leave now might just maybe be up to something'. Rather than doing these things, though, you do show clever things like the handwriting thing, things that don't take a lot of screen time. And you definitely show L and Light duking it out. They didn't have a lot of moments of 'oh, that was a good move'. In general, Turner was annoyingly passive as a protagonist. They did have the agents die in pretty much the same way as canon but it was specifically Mia who did that, and it wasn't something new. They did have the bit at the end, where you learn that the whole chain of coincidences was all in Turner's control...and he wasn't shown to have a single clever moment before that point, so it felt entirely unearned.
*Philosophy: There's a lot about how you define justice and morality in the original Death Note. This movie utterly fell down in that regard. The original had questions about 'well, is capital punishment a good idea? who gets to decide who gets punished, and for what? What if they miss something?' This one...well.
Apparently Mia was created to separate out "the sociopathic qualities of Light Yagami". Personally, I don't think you can be a serial killer, even of bad people, and not be considered to have issues (I am curious about how Dexter handles it, but not curious enough that I actually want to watch it; I'm on L's side all the way). This makes it feel like she exists, in a large part, as the scapegoat--hear me out on this. The film keeps showing Turner as reluctant, a "good kid", who just happens to be choosing "the lesser evil". Basically, she can take all the blame of being a sociopathic serial killer, and Turner gets to be the pure, good little serial killer who is, in fact, making the world better for everyone. Mia's the one that kills innocents. She's the one that prevents Turner from saving Watari's life. Even if he wrote the name first, he had this whole plan to leave Watari alive afterwards. They drew a good line in the sand, distinction between the sides, when L tells Turner "I don't kill", but he uses the Death Note in revenge at the end of the movie. "It's completely fine, natural even, to kill people you deem to be evil", seems the message. Maybe that's not how it's actually supposed to go, but. You gotta think about your themes as you're writing them, and if you're saying one thing and doing another, what you say is not what people are going to remember. So there's no sides, no debate, only the movie's answer.
*How to Use/Worldbuilding: We didn't get to see much of the rules. The manga and anime both integrated the rules well, slowly adding them in over time. This movie has Ryuk utter a line something like "Rules? Is that all we're going to do, Light?" I actually really, really hate that line, because it's showing a contempt and mocking for the original series that I see nowhere else in this movie, though it would explain how it became action, not intellectual thriller. The rules were actually really important because that gave us the basis for understanding how the notebook worked, a framework of what was and was not possible, and allowed Light Yagami to be an extremely creative adversary. In the original, you can't write a date more than 23 days in the future, but is there a clause in this version to say that Turner couldn't just write his own name and 'dies of old age' in the notebook? We don't know!
There's also some differences with the shinigami in this version. I'm fairly certain there was a bit in the original where Ryuk's talking about how boring it is just sitting up there in the Shinigami World, and that sometimes, in boredom, they wrote each other's names in their notebooks, but it didn't work. They also didn't know how the Death Notes worked and didn't have much incentive to find out, because they were lazy. In this movie, a shinigami whose name is written in the Death Note will die...if you manage to complete the name before the shinigami kills you. However, we also see that, at the end with the Ferris wheel scene, Ryuk is the one carrying out the instructions from the Death Note. So Gods of Death are, in this one, pretty much just supernatural hitmen? What, if a shinigami's name is written in the Death Note, another shinigami shows up to carry it out? Can a shinigami go "nah, don't feel like going gentle into that good night" and fight back? How does this work???
*How to Fix: They kind of hinted that this came after the Kira case, but didn't explicitly say it. If they had gone through with that, it would've fixed a lot of the issues. Still not perfect; it still would've been less interesting of a crime thriller/whatever, but a new L, a new Watari, a new Kira, none of which are as intelligent as the previous ones, that could've worked. Really interesting things could've been done with 'the legacies of L and Kira'. It also would've added a new layer of tension as it's already known the method of killing is a notebook of death (and Turner would've had to treat it like the loaded weapon it is rather than just a 'yeah I can buy this for two dollars at Walmart and carry it around with no repercussions *whistles* yes that bothered me). I'm harping on the handwriting thing, but it was something I noticed, would've been really easy to add in, and could have gone somewhere. I could even be entirely wrong about the handwriting thing (for his Mom's killer, it looked like he actually switched to capitalizing all letters and it looked less sloppy). I'm just fixating on it a) because it was a really quick thing I came up with that made me feel clever and b) it feels like it was almost in the movie and just needed a tiny push.
*In summary: this could've been really cool but the writing held it back.
*Casting. I don't think there was a single casting decision I disagreed with. Lakeith Stanfield did a brilliant job as L--he's got all the quirks down pat. Paul Nakauchi's Watari is slightly more of a nuanced, quirky presence (seriously, he can do both dignified and slightly more possibly-yakuza presence and uses a gun and that was cool). Willem Dafoe as Ryuk was pitch-perfect and a delight every time he showed up on screen. Beta-Senpai and I also flipped out when we saw Masi Oka on screen, even if it was just a cameo (Hiro from Heroes!!). And it's fascinating that he was also a producer. (Supposedly, I also shortly before missed seeing a much older Cigarette Smoking Man, but I missed seeing CSM. Which...just looked it up, yes, it absolutely was him. Interesting.) Apparently they also had Soichiro Yagami's English VA for a bit, too, but we completely missed that. Still. Some fun cameos there too.
EDIT: I would like to add that while I've seen a lot of 'they were bad actors/miscast' in other reviews, it looked like it was a lot more just bad direction and a bad script. If you're trapped within bad direction and a bad script, there's only so much you can do even as a great actor.
*Music. The soundtrack for most of it, while not Tanuichi Hideki and Yoshihisa Hirano, was great. I will probably listen to it by itself. Except for after the dance. Then they just started using songs with lyrics in wildly inappropriate times and places that completely undercut the tension and seriousness of the scenes. I'm fairly sure that they got the rights for all those songs, didn't have the time to squish them all in that scene, and just decided to use them in other places throughout the movie. The worst part is that it undercuts the finale, although the finale is a bit of a jumbled mess in the first place.
*Some scenes: The scene at the beginning with him cheating for other students was supposed to be showing he's intelligent. It did do that. It didn't do anything to convince me he's clever or set up the ending, though. Because he gets caught. Light Yagami would not get caught, even if he'd been on the bad end of a fight. (Also, I'm not entirely sure if they were setting up something about handwriting with him, because to me it looked like the second name he wrote was completely different than his usual handwriting. So it might've been cool if they showed that he could mimic handwriting, and maybe if they followed my fix, it could be used as, I dunno, some way to show, once they got their hands on the notebook, that this isn't just one kid doing this. It's a death cult or something. He could even have planted the notebook on someone else if the cops were getting close, and his handwriting wouldn't be anywhere in the thing. It's not like they could prove anything using Ryuk, since in this version you can't see the Shinigami unless you're the owner. Which should take seven days, unless there's some rule about relinquishing the Death Note that we didn't see.
On the other hand, there was a scene in the café where Light is looking at pictures of Ryuk and he's in, say, samurai gear and stuff, and it seems to be drawn in Obata's style and that was amazing. I want more of that, please. It was all the better because it was apropos of nothing. Like, they didn't frame it as Light trying to do research on how to kill Gods of Death or anything. It was just like...yeah, okay, these pictures are amazing, but how and why are you looking at that? What, did Ryuk do a photography session and stick the results in the front pages of the Death Note? What is happening? It was hilarious, though, full points for that.
I don't know how to feel about the Cultist Ex Machina.
I did notice the torture porn there, Mia.
They did also acknowledge how abusive Wammy's was, although, again, not in a way that made sense (pushing intelligent kids hard enough that one of them committed suicide and the others had their own neuroses years after the fact, sure, throwing them in a vault for seven months and seeing if they survive, what was the point there??)
Beta-senpai made a joke about 'losing his marbles' when Ryuk first showed up, and yep. Yep, I think that part of the scene was entirely scripted for that pun.
*Cinematography: Really well done, from the color to the angles to the framing of the scenes. It really created a sense of atmosphere and spectacle that almost worked. They were definitely a lot bloodier in showing the deaths.
*Writing: This is where the movie fails. It's *okay*, but this isn't the intellectual tennis match. Sure, okay, so other people can't see Ryuk if they touch the Death Note, okay, you still probably don't want to have it out in the middle of gym class. What if you switch up the notebooks as you're taking notes in class? Yagami wouldn't make that mistake, but I could see Turner doing that. They don't really show Light or L getting that many intellectual victories, and it feels a whole lot like they're taking a stand on what justice is, rather than the entire series posing the question. There are also issues with vague rules and worldbuilding. I'll probably going to go over this in more detail in the points below and those will definitely have more direct spoilers.
**SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** **SPOILERS**
*Intelligent Game of Cat-and-Mouse/Tennis Match: Mostly lacking. This is a big deal and one of the key points as it's one of the draws to the series. They tried to write Light as the clever mastermind orchestrating everything at the end. I don't buy it, because they didn't spend any time setting that up. Being intelligent is not the same thing as being clever! In other words, Book Smarts are not the same thing as Street Smarts, and they didn't give us any time showing Turner was anything other than Book Smart. You don't bring evidence that could put you on death row or in jail to school. You definitely don't show it to a girl to try to get laid. You also think 'hmm, maybe the girl I just had an argument with about whether to use the notebook, went up to my room alone, grabbed a book and is putting that book in her backpack and wants to leave now might just maybe be up to something'. Rather than doing these things, though, you do show clever things like the handwriting thing, things that don't take a lot of screen time. And you definitely show L and Light duking it out. They didn't have a lot of moments of 'oh, that was a good move'. In general, Turner was annoyingly passive as a protagonist. They did have the agents die in pretty much the same way as canon but it was specifically Mia who did that, and it wasn't something new. They did have the bit at the end, where you learn that the whole chain of coincidences was all in Turner's control...and he wasn't shown to have a single clever moment before that point, so it felt entirely unearned.
*Philosophy: There's a lot about how you define justice and morality in the original Death Note. This movie utterly fell down in that regard. The original had questions about 'well, is capital punishment a good idea? who gets to decide who gets punished, and for what? What if they miss something?' This one...well.
Apparently Mia was created to separate out "the sociopathic qualities of Light Yagami". Personally, I don't think you can be a serial killer, even of bad people, and not be considered to have issues (I am curious about how Dexter handles it, but not curious enough that I actually want to watch it; I'm on L's side all the way). This makes it feel like she exists, in a large part, as the scapegoat--hear me out on this. The film keeps showing Turner as reluctant, a "good kid", who just happens to be choosing "the lesser evil". Basically, she can take all the blame of being a sociopathic serial killer, and Turner gets to be the pure, good little serial killer who is, in fact, making the world better for everyone. Mia's the one that kills innocents. She's the one that prevents Turner from saving Watari's life. Even if he wrote the name first, he had this whole plan to leave Watari alive afterwards. They drew a good line in the sand, distinction between the sides, when L tells Turner "I don't kill", but he uses the Death Note in revenge at the end of the movie. "It's completely fine, natural even, to kill people you deem to be evil", seems the message. Maybe that's not how it's actually supposed to go, but. You gotta think about your themes as you're writing them, and if you're saying one thing and doing another, what you say is not what people are going to remember. So there's no sides, no debate, only the movie's answer.
*How to Use/Worldbuilding: We didn't get to see much of the rules. The manga and anime both integrated the rules well, slowly adding them in over time. This movie has Ryuk utter a line something like "Rules? Is that all we're going to do, Light?" I actually really, really hate that line, because it's showing a contempt and mocking for the original series that I see nowhere else in this movie, though it would explain how it became action, not intellectual thriller. The rules were actually really important because that gave us the basis for understanding how the notebook worked, a framework of what was and was not possible, and allowed Light Yagami to be an extremely creative adversary. In the original, you can't write a date more than 23 days in the future, but is there a clause in this version to say that Turner couldn't just write his own name and 'dies of old age' in the notebook? We don't know!
There's also some differences with the shinigami in this version. I'm fairly certain there was a bit in the original where Ryuk's talking about how boring it is just sitting up there in the Shinigami World, and that sometimes, in boredom, they wrote each other's names in their notebooks, but it didn't work. They also didn't know how the Death Notes worked and didn't have much incentive to find out, because they were lazy. In this movie, a shinigami whose name is written in the Death Note will die...if you manage to complete the name before the shinigami kills you. However, we also see that, at the end with the Ferris wheel scene, Ryuk is the one carrying out the instructions from the Death Note. So Gods of Death are, in this one, pretty much just supernatural hitmen? What, if a shinigami's name is written in the Death Note, another shinigami shows up to carry it out? Can a shinigami go "nah, don't feel like going gentle into that good night" and fight back? How does this work???
*How to Fix: They kind of hinted that this came after the Kira case, but didn't explicitly say it. If they had gone through with that, it would've fixed a lot of the issues. Still not perfect; it still would've been less interesting of a crime thriller/whatever, but a new L, a new Watari, a new Kira, none of which are as intelligent as the previous ones, that could've worked. Really interesting things could've been done with 'the legacies of L and Kira'. It also would've added a new layer of tension as it's already known the method of killing is a notebook of death (and Turner would've had to treat it like the loaded weapon it is rather than just a 'yeah I can buy this for two dollars at Walmart and carry it around with no repercussions *whistles* yes that bothered me). I'm harping on the handwriting thing, but it was something I noticed, would've been really easy to add in, and could have gone somewhere. I could even be entirely wrong about the handwriting thing (for his Mom's killer, it looked like he actually switched to capitalizing all letters and it looked less sloppy). I'm just fixating on it a) because it was a really quick thing I came up with that made me feel clever and b) it feels like it was almost in the movie and just needed a tiny push.
*In summary: this could've been really cool but the writing held it back.
