Books Made Into Movies: Death Note

I want to preface this review by saying that you need to take my opinion here with a few more grains of salt than usual. I learned pretty quickly that I did not much care for the film and may, perhaps, have ceased to pay very much attention. For this reason, I shall endeavor to keep the review short and comment only on aspects of which I am sure.

Did you know that Shinigami only eat apples?

Although I have not actually read all of the Death Note manga, I have read a fair chunk of it and have also seen the anime. Yet again, this may be cheating, but it's my blog so I'm going to call that enough. What I enjoyed about the manga and the anime (at least for the first half of the series) were the incredible mind games played by L and Light. They are so incredibly intelligent that I really loved watching them try to outdo one another.

I will take this potato chip. And eat it!

One of the best things about Death Note is watching Light's devolution from an incredibly intelligent high school student with a bright future to an absolutely insane, power-hungry, out of control guy. When Light first gets the Death Note (a thing which is not really explained in this live action adaptation), he intends to use it for good. He kills folk in an attempt to get people to stop committing crimes, because they know Kira is watching.

This adaptation does not show the coolly calculating part of his personality, skipping to the insane side that just wants to take over the world. A series that should have you rooting (at least at the outset) for the murderer at least a little bit, much like with Boondock Saints, instead has you thinking about how much you hate his face and how lame and childish he is.

Attractiveness and effects fail.

On top of that, the actor playing Light lacked charisma, which is pretty darn essential if you're going to trick people into trusting you. The effects used to produce Ryuk were not especially good either, as shown above. Needless to say, I will not be continuing on to the next two films in the series.