DEATH NOTE (live-action movie) – REVIEW (spoilers!!)

So as a follow up to my finishing watching the Death Note anime, I did a bit of reading on Wiki, hoping to clarify a few of my mind’s issues, and came upon the fact that there was a live-action movie version of the manga, with a few key differences. I stopped reading there, and decided to watch it for myself first.

And I must say, I’m glad I did.

I’m not big on film versions changing huge amounts of an established fictional work. I can understand it with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy — it’s such a huge work that doing a proper version including everything would turn it into a twenty four hour long film. In much the same way I can understand the film version of Rowling’s Order of the Phoenix doing the same thing.

But I was intrigued as to whether it would work shortening 12+ hours of anime into around what, 5 hours of film…

As it turns out, it worked beautifully. While certain parts of the plot naturally had to be changed, the whole thing felt so much tighter. There was no messing about with Near and Mello. No Yotsuba Corporation. No extraneous shinigami and plot turns.

And, perhaps most importantly, it was a battle of wits between Light and L for the whole 5 hours.

I won’t say a lot about the acting or casting, mainly because it’s not really very important to me in this instance. The character designs are taken straight from the anime for the most part. What really mattered was how the story was told, and in my opinion it was the more fluid, poignant version of the events surrounding the Death Note.

Yes it changes the ending in order to keep L alive long enough to unmask Kira properly. But it was handled poignantly. It also includes a bit of a monologue for Misa, which if you’ve just read my thoughts on the anime, you’ll know I was wanting. In some ways, because the cast was kept smaller, the emotional attachment to the characters was tighter. I was happy Chief Yagami survived, though I felt quite sad that he had to keep the secret of Kira/Light’s relationship from his daughter and wife.

Really the only thing I felt that the live action version lacked was the music. Unlike in the anime, where music played an important part in building suspense, I didn’t really notice the music in the film. I also kinda missed the internal monologues of Light and L, but in a film version too many of those would get very confusing so I’m glad they didn’t have many. Just enough to give away thoughts if absolutely necessary.

All in all, I’d recommend watching it after watching the anime run rather than before.

Score: 8.6/10