The Death Note[1] adaptation by Netflix[2] has a lot of things wrong but the biggest one is its preposterous attempt at compressing a big chunk of the story told by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata over 108 chapters in the manga (and 37 episodes in the critically-acclaimed anime[3]) into a film running barely over 90 minutes. In packing a dozen hours worth of a tale about morality, religion, violence, and justice into a feature-length project, the Death Note Netflix movie – directed by Adam Wingard (The Guest), and co-written by Jeremy Slater, and brothers Charley & Vlas Parlapanides – fails to handle the nuance that has made Death Note so resonant and popular, and instead produces a gory violent film by way of weird teenage high-school romance.
Even as the Death Note setting and the characters have been transported to America, the gist is the same: a brainy teenager with no friends named Light Turner (Nat Wolff) is going about his school life when a notebook falls straight out of the sky and lands beside him. It reads 'Death Note' on the cover, and when Light ruffles through the pages, he comes across hundreds of rules inscribed on the pages that govern the book's purpose and use.
The most important one is the first one: if you write someone's name in the Death Note while picturing their face, then that individual will die. Light isn't sure what to make of it, but as his curiosity returns him to the pages after school one day, he's greeted by an 8-foot porcupine-like monster who appears out of the blue, and scares the life out of the high-pitched high-school student.
The official trailer for Netflix's Death Note, available August 25...