So, I am a fan of the original anime series and thought meh what the hell and gave it watch... I thought it was terrible, granted Willem Dafoe doing the death god? Amazing couldn't of picked a better person to voice it, but they completely killed Death Note for me. Wanted to see what everyone else thinks!
Glad i'm not the only one with this thought!! If you were going to do a Japanese anime in a real film and put american actors in it, at least stay someone to the story and have right looking actors for it because the casting was terrible!
It wasn't the casting that bothered me, it was the writing. Spoiler Light is a much-loved overachiever with a stable family life in an expensive house with a high-ranking police officer father, not a whiny little shite living right next to the railroad tracks. L's chess-like pursuit of Kira is all about move and countermove, not shouting and running around with Deckard's gun. Light experiments with the Death Note, reluctantly at first then with increasing speed as he decides he can make the world a better place, long before Ryuk shows up. He's also motivated by the desire to forge a new world without criminality, not to get into a cheerleader's knickers. Then there's Ryuk himself, who dropped his spare Death Note in the human realm because he was bored in the realm of the shinigami and who doesn't actually kill anyone himself. Basically, nobody was as they should be (except possibly Watari). That's without even mentioning the pointless changes to the Death Note's rules. In the manga, anime, and Japanese live action adaptations, it's key to the plot that: if the manner of death is not written or is impossible (such as someone in London dying on the moon) they drop dead of a simple heart attack; only the owner of the Death Note can see the shinigami at all times, but anyone can see the shinigami by holding on to the Death Note or a piece thereof; when an owner relinquishes ownership they lose all memory of the Death Note and their actions; you can trade half your remaining lifespan for the eyes of the shinigami, which allow you to see a person's true name and lifespan. In Netflix's version: Ryuk gets to choose the manner of death and delights in doing so; only the owner of the Death Note can see Ryuk (the only shinigami), and even if you're holding the Death Note you can't see him; relinquishing ownership does nowt to your memory; there's no eyes of the shinigami option. Even the ending - the one time when Light was acting like Light, working smartly to defeat L - didn't make sense, because "the page from the Death Note falls out of the book and is ultimately consumed by fire" has no impact on the death of the person and thus wouldn't happen. You can't write "a bunch of unrelated things happen by magic then my target dies." Effectively, what Netflix actually made was Low Budget Final Destination. Which is pointless, because we already have a Low Budget Final Destination; it's called Final Destination. Rant over. Now I want to watch the anime instead...
Yea Ryuk choosing the deaths did make me question where the hell that came from....... rules state that if no cause of death has been written down, they will just suffer heart attacks
