Saffron and Sage

So, me and my roommates all watched Netflix Note together, and uh.

<_<

>_>

I kind of like it.

As an adaption, it’s wildly inaccurate to the point where it’s just a cheesy B movie set in the Death Note universe. But once you just accept that White Yagami is a lovestruck quasisentient moron who couldn’t keikaku his way out of a paper bag and
screams like an 8-year-old girl getting stung by a bee, it’s pretty enjoyable on that front.

[th_youtube id=’aPulAk0nuT4′ name=’eeeeee’]

I wouldn’t call it “good’, as it had way too much slow-mo to pop music and Adam West dutch angles, but it’s fun in a dumb way.

FWIW I liked the most of the first half of the OG death note, and thought Light Yagami giving himself amnesia and manipulating himself just as keikaku was when the series crossed into stupidville.

The movie is really short! It’s only about 90 minutes, most which is in pointless slow-mo, but then it skips over plot details at warp speed.

I thought Willem DaFoe would be the best part of the movie, but it’s actually Lakeith Stanfield, who plays L. L is also the least changed from the anime as a character, though he’s still changed quite a bit.

Ryuk is fine, but he’s almost entirely superfluous and could be cut without losing anything. The effects for him were also really bad.

There’s a LOT of unnecessary gore in this movie. A dude gets hit by a ladder moving at 20 MPH and his fucking head a splode. That is not the only literal head explosion in the movie.

I find it bullshit that “Watari” counts as a name for the Death Note but “L” doesn’t, and it makes L look like a fucking asshole for not having Watari wear a mask (Not that it would’ve helped, since Light never even fucking saw Watari’s face that entire subplot was dumb dumb dumb), makes Light look like a moron for having Watari call his fucking cell phone, and makes L look like a moron again for not tapping his own phones.

“It sort of means killer in Japanese” was offensively stupid, and stupidly offensive. We had to take a break to really digest that line.

Likewise, the idea that Kira was trying to trick people into thinking he was Japanese was….meta.

It still baffles me that a white kid in Seattle is named Light and no one finds that odd, but I guess no one finds it odd in the Japanese version either. So much else is changed, and the character is almost literally the opposite of the Japanese version, that they should have
just called him Lenny or something. Would make it less confusing to compare them.

Light saying “Rye-uck” and having it be corrected a minute later seems like it was there just to troll fans of the anime.

I like that the movie made a bigger deal of the “mind control” aspect than the anime did. Light having Mia throw his page into a fire while falling out of the ferris wheel seems a little convenient, but we were told the limit of the Note was that “it had to be physically possible”, so I’ll guess I’ll allow it.

I also liked Light Turner/Mia Stutton’s relationship more than I liked Light Yagami/Misa Amane’s Joker/Harley setup where she was madly in love with him and he thought she was an incompetent minion. I always wanted Japanese Light’s dismissal of Misa to get him in more trouble, so I’m glad to see it happen here. Mia is simply more interesting than Misa was, in part because she stole most of Light’s intelligence on the way to Netflix.

Although that intelligence disappears while trying to blackmail Light with the Death Note while he has it and could have just burned the page himself and killed her without the whole ferris wheel rigamarole.

When the “you can only burn one name per book” rule was introduced, I immediately assumed Light would have to choose between saving himself orWatari, so props to the movie for not going the obvious direction

L chasing Light through 400 different buildings got increasingly hilarious with every minute it lasted.

The film gains 200 intelligence points in the literal last minute, though, as White Yagami suddenly turns into the anime version and explains a convoluted keikaku that was still something he could have reasonably come up with in a pinch. I also liked that the movie was subtle enough to not call attention to Light actually forcing Mia to take the book by writing it that way despite what he said at the time about it being conditional. It’s a great way to get at anime pedants who
point out that you explicitly couldn’t use the Death Note on someone like that in the anime. He didn’t!

I also like that the movie doesn’t feel the need to explain why Light randomly decides to confess everything, just showing us that L got the book and letting us realize ourselves what Ryuk was laughing about.

And I really liked that Light Turner finally turns a into Light Yagami-like intelligence right at the end, and is immediately defeated because of something Mia did that he forgot about. Cross-adaption karma!

Allin all, this is a 6/10 movie that I surely wouldn’t have liked if I hadn’t seen it with friends, but it might be worth it just for seeing the american Light meeting Ryuk holy shit that was hilarious.