Death Note 2017

Can you feel the angst tonight? 

Finally, it's here! The long-awaited, white-washed, dumbed down Death Note adaptation of your dreams is streaming on le Netflix, and it's the bomb!!! Get your popcorn and drugs ready, people.

I can't tell you how excited I was to watch this, and when I realized it's set in Seattle? I died! My god, how more perfect can it get? Well let me tell you, folks: it got much more parfait. It's so perfekt that you have to watch it to believe it. First of all, the whiteness is blinding, and I love being blinded. It's only natural for a story that's originally set in Japan with Japanese characters to take place in Washington State with super white people. It's so white that the actor playing Light, despite being a natural brunette, dyed part (only part) of his hair blonde. He's very dedicated. But the best part about this? They turned it into a high school drama! Fuck characters with interesting backgrounds, and screw detailed, thought-out plots. Personally, I prefer the least amount of story possible, and I hate, and I do mean hate, character development. Netflix truly knew what they were doing with this. I might even send a thank-you letter to them for gifting me with such a precious gem.

Listing all of the changes that were made would take a long time, and I haven't seen the anime or the original movies in a few years, so it's safe to say that I missed some notable alterations. Sidenote: if you haven't watch the aforementioned, what are you waiting for?! I was surprised by how well-done the Japanese movies were. However, nothing beats THIS.

A few changes off the top of my head: Light's mother is dead, and there is no sister. THERE IS NO SISTER; Misa is now Mia, and she's not a star, her family wasn't brutally murdered, and she isn't...interesting. At all. She's basically an entirely different character.

My favorite character, L, is still the highlight of this story, even if he doesn't have quite the same uniqueness that I always loved him for. The actor tried, though, he really did, but what can you do with a movie that is already down the toilet? Oh, you know what? I just realized how not racist this movie is. So what if they cast white people in this? They also cast a black dude as L, so, you know, that's being super diverse. You can't be angry now.

Whoever wrote this wanted to keep one or two notable plot points in the movie, but overall they changed a decent amount, and for no discernible reason. You could argue that they wanted to make this their own and have it stand out from its predecessors, but there's no logic in that if it's simply going to fall into a pit of cliches and dull, forgettable characters. 

Another angle they could have opted for: the death note is not unique to Light, and it's not the only notebook. It's fair to assume that hundreds, if not thousands of people from all over the world have used them over the years. Instead of attempting a remake an already solid franchise, they could have opted to tell a different story about some other poor soul who happened to get his hands on a death note. I honestly would have been more excited to watch it if that had been the case. Either way, this movie is a pimple, and I want to pop it.

My grade: D