DEATH NOTE: A Light Adaptation

Director: Adam Wingard
Writers: Charley Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides, Jeremy Slater
Cast: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley, Shea Whigham, Willem Dafoe
Runtime: 101 mins.
2017

A quick word about adaptation. Translating a work of art to a new medium isn't just about copying what came before. It must be an entirely new work. Adaptations don't derive their value from how close they come to replicating the original, but from how they function on their own merits. No art can perfectly replicate what worked in a different medium and time.

There are questions that all artists ought to answer as they create, but these questions become especially pressing with adaptation. Why does your work need to exist? What makes it relevant now? What about this medium enhances your ability to tell the story?

Adam Wingard's Death Note cares dick all about these questions. You'd be hard pressed to find a compelling original idea in this mess. I guess there are slightly futuristic guns?


The film was announced and immediately suffered a bit of controversy. The source is one of the more popular anime of the past couple decades, and the Death Note story is bound tightly to Japanese culture, so many found it distasteful that the Americanization would be whitewashed. I held out a bit of hope at the time. The protagonist Light is an antihero who receives the Death Note, a notebook that will kill anyone whose name is written inside. This Note is watched over by a shinigami, a death god from Japanese folklore. Light makes it his life's work to use the Death Note to eradicate evil and crime from the world. How interesting would it be, then, to explore this character freshly through a lens of whiteness? What if the story shifted from themes of repression and rigid social norms to themes of privilege and white supremacy? What if the American Death Note leaned into a portrayal of Light as a school shooter type? These provocations only become more interesting with the casting of Lakeith Stanfield as L, the hypergenius detective who tries to hunt down this mysterious supernatural killer. This could be an adaptation that has a reason to exist right now.

Such a shame that Death Note has no interest in engaging with anything remotely that interesting. Instead it crams the complex and precise machinations of the anime into a crummy blockbuster. The film lurches from incompatible idea to incompatible idea, and totally castrates any commentary surrounding the central character by making his girlfriend 'the really bad one.' All dramatic tension is tossed out halfway through when L solves the mystery; he spends the rest of the runtime blustering, running around, and shooting a gun, which couldn't be more antithetical to the character's strengths. And the greatest achievement of the original, its riveting intellectual cat and mouse game, is ripped to shreds and replaced with vapid plot twist reveal montages.

Comparing a film to its source material, as well as comparing it to a better movie I had in mind, are not great forms of criticism. But to take this movie solely on its own merits is to be baffled by choices and plot elements that exist for no reason. This is a film that has no understanding of what makes its central dramatic structure compelling.

At least Lakeith Stanfield is fun to watch, and Willem Dafoe gets to show up every twenty minutes or so just to cackle. There are worse vestigial limbs to have dangling from your movie.

1 / 5  BLOBS