Anime and Hollywood have had a rocky at best relationship since a few years ago. Almost twenty years ago, they used to be best friends, but then Hollywood and anime developed their own weird personalities over the years. Now Hollywood cares about superheroes and anime cares about moe-shit no one likes. Remember The Matrix? The creators of that movie borrowed a lot of concepts from Ghost in the Shell (i.e. is a cyberpunk film), and before that, Akira borrowed some concepts from movies like Bladerunner.
Then came Castlevania, a netflix series that did things right by creating anime with mass appeal by basically being good. Now how do you do that wrong? By making Death Note on Netflix.
The movie was a piece of shit. They took one of the smartest, most interesting protagonists in anime and made him into a fucking loser kid who can't get girls. First of all, such good solid writing, as solid as the sarcasm in this sentence. Because who the fuck would want to identify with a pussy wimp bitch of a teenager? So Light Yagami becomes Light Turner, yes, not joking. Couldn't think of a better last name? Why not Neutron, Squarepants, or even Fenton. This is not even Light, so from now on, we'll call this teenager who looks like Milo Yiannopolus' redneck cousin Timmy Turner. Timmy's just an average kid who no one understands. His life is shit, he treats his parents like shit, and he's a dumb kid. He has a crush on Misa-I mean Mia, or as I'm now calling her Trixie Tang. But Trixie is with Chad, which Timmy does not like. One day, he finds a deathnote that falls from the sky, then after that, he and Trixie get into a fight with Bully McHighschoolPants, Timmy gets in trouble with the principal, where he whines about how they were able to stop it. While in detention, Timmy Turner begins to gloss over da rules of the Death Note. Noticing peoples' names written in it, he sees more blank pages, but then Ryuk appears in the back of the class, Timmy overreacts by screaming like a girl. No, I'm not exaggerating, this unintentionally hilarious scene is where Timmy Turner actually sounds and acts like a woman.
Yes, Ryuk just went around throwing chairs and desks around while Timmy screamed like a girl. First of all, why the hell would a God of Death throw things like that? They're not supposed to make themselves known to humans. This was just a cheap scary scene. Then Ryuk tells Timmy to write down the name of Bully McHighSchoolPants and decapitated down, he gets decapitated by a ladder that flies off a van, I laugh, Light overreacts it's hilarious. Then Timmy and dad gets into an argument, Timmy gets all angsty and goes to his room, then reads more of Da Rules, when Ryuk tells him he can kill the guy who killed his mother and got acquitted. It happens when he pukes blood and dies. Jeez, this kid can't even have the balls to kill a lot of criminals? He has to have other people tell him to? This guy sucks.
So Timmy, knowing how powerful the Death Note is, decides to keep it hidden from publi-naw, I'm just joking, he reads it out into the open, tells Trixie about it and demonstrates. Seriously? You're gonna let a total stranger know that you have the power to become god? Totally not gonna see that backfire. Instead, Trixie joins Timmy in their little quest to kill every criminal across the world, Timmy becomes "Kira" because it's Light in Russian and Gaelic, but I checked Google, and it's Legkiy in Russian, and Solas in Gaelic. So this Timmy is full of shit. Then comes the obligatory sex scenes...and they're teenagers, so this doesn't make anyone feel icky at all? Then comes L who is black for some reason. Okay, L, I mean AJ, is the stereotypical detective that is obsessed with finding the killer.
I honestly couldn't finish the whole movie, that's as far as I went without dying from boredom. It's long, drawn out, and it's just bad. As an anime adaptation, it's terrible, but judging it on it's own merits, it's just a weird amalgation of generic horror meets generic crime story. I'm not even angry at the movie, but I wish I was, I want to find something to be angry about, overall, without even comparing it to the original Death Note anime, the premise seems great, but falls flat due to every character either having the acting range of cardboard. Even Trixie Tang was just a bore. At least Misa HAD a personality, Mia just does not. What does she do? What has changed? Just cut her from the film and literally nothing could change.
I mean, how would you market it? It's an anime adaptation, it's supposed to be cut short, that's expected, but then so many things change to appeal to the average Americans who don't even get or like anime. To the average guy here in America, anime is for nerds, and almost every single American woman's reaction to guys watching anime of any kind is always "Eww, he watches those weird asian cartoons, I'm not dating him!", and that's actually scary, more scary than the movie. so how the hell is this adaptation gonna survive? I'll tell ya; it wouldn't.
Verdict:
Watch this instead:
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