fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST 3889 ]

[ SECRET POST 3889 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3889 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #557.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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It was terrible. I wasn't coming in with high expectations, but I am a huge Death Note fan so I knew I'd have to try hard to be open-minded to change.

But it was really terrible. Butchering the source material might have been forgivable (?) if it were at least a good film, but it's shit even if you pretend it's a totally independent story! I cannot get over what they did to poor Light. wtfff

Anyone else see it yet?

I saw the clip of Light in the classroom and laughed so hard I was crying.

How bad was it? What did they completely ruin?

Or is it more appropriate to ask what they didn't ruin, if anything?

I guess it's a matter of what you consider ruining, but beyond there being a Death Note and a Shinigami named Ryuk, there's basically nothing that feels like the original. Vague spoilers ahead (very vague):

Light is now an unpopular dweeb who sells people extra copies of homework as a side hustle, and is pressured by Ryuk to use the Death Note, and when he does, he uses it to take revenge against school bullies and his murdered mother's killers. Though we're told he's super smart, he doesn't do anything smart, instead gets jerked around by Misa, the goth girl with zero motivation who gets more of a kick out of being Kira than he does - who, by the way, he's mega horny for and massively in love with. L gets shockingly little screen time and isn't particularly successful at anything, and his character takes a drastic turn three quarters into the movie. The movie focuses a lot more on the emo high school relationship between Misa and Light, complete with sex scenes and high school prom night, and pretty much cuts the cat-and-mouse games between L and Light completely. And no one dies from heart attacks, everyone only dies from over-the-top gory deaths like exploding or graphic decapitation. Because, edgy, or something.

The plot is only loosely (very loosely) familiar in the beginning, before it just completely does its own thing.

what

They made High School Death Note?

Fuck, they really should've gotten Zac Efron to be Light. What an injustice. >:(

It was so, so awful. I guess it might work if you take it as a 80s pop parody AU, or something, but otherwise no.

Poor Light, indeed. And as far as I remember, L wasn't supposed to lose his cool that easily either.

I thought it started out okay (though Light screaming like a little girl had me crying from laughter) and then something went wrong about a third of the way in. The tone was all over the place and, though the pacing was fast, it felt weirdly choppy. Ryuk was the best character and, while I kinda liked L, he felt like a mish-mash of L and Mello and I think I would've liked him better if he'd been another orphan from the Whammy House (or whatever it was in this adaptation) with a different name. That would've made me stop mentally comparing anime L with Netflix L.

I think I would've liked it better if Mia had outsmarted Light and gotten him killed while she survived. Light never really come off like a smart kid and Mia seemed more cunning to me, but at the same time, I didn't know anything about Mia except that she was some kind of edgelord cheerleader who got off on killing people.

The music choices were baffling. My friend and I were cracking up so hard during the ferris wheel scene that we woke up her kid, who wanted to see what was so funny. I wasn't pleased with the ending or the bloopers during the credits. To be honest, it actually wasn't the worst anime adaptation I've ever seen. It wasn't good, but it wasn't horrendously bad. My expections were incredibly low, but I was entertained. It's the kind of movie that's more fun to watch with friends so you can talk about how baffling it is.

Mia definitely made no sense. She was, as you said, just an edgelord cheerleader who Light had a boner for, for presumably no reason other than she was hot. Her personality was terrible. Even in the beginning, Light thinks she betrayed him after the bully fight. It's baffling that Light would just show her the Death Note because he's madly attracted to her and wants to impress her, but it's even more baffling that this random girl is cool with it. From there on, she is portrayed as willing to kill all kinds of people that Light is not willing to kill. It's not only unexplained what Mia's motivations are besides being an innately horrible person, it's unexplained what Light could possibly like about her if he's a more moral person than she.

I think there really would've been no point in Light at all - without him being remotely reminiscent of the original character - if Mia outsmarted Light and killed him. I really, really wanted Light to betray and kill her and go full Kira mode - because it would've at least justified this Light being a, erm, nicer (?) guy than the anime Light, for the sake of contrast. Plus, it would've been cool if he ~judged~ her to be a horrible person and took her out. I know he kind of ended up killing her, but they played it off like he didn't actually intend to and really didn't want to do it.

The whole Mia thing was just a mess, honestly. It wasn't satisfying to see Light jerked around by her when he's supposed to be the one jerking people around. I wouldn't mind a more vicious and intelligent version of Misa, but she didn't have any motivations. Hell, they gave Misa's motivations to Light (parent killed by bad guys and never got punished, ergo the avenger role, instead of Light just killing people out of his pure idealism). Just so disappointing.

I just watched it, and even if they had sorted out the writing, acting, and pacing, it still wasn't even slightly a Death Note story.

Like it felt like something that was more trying to be some weird 80s dark comedy, but then random Death Note references were there. If they were going to do that story they just never should have called it Death Note.

I was trying to watch it but quit right at the beginning because I got second hand embarrassment when Light was trying to protect the girl.

Heh, for some reason Light telling the bully that he'd get child abuses charges for hitting him made me laugh. The principal was a real dick about that whole incident though.

nayrt but that was such a weird scene. Like, shouldn't they have been trying to establish that Light is smart? He's... selling homework (no ethics, evidently) and then tries to outwit a bully and gets punched down in failure anyway? What kind of character is this? It's clearly not Light Yagami.

There was a smart kid at my school who used to do people's homework for a price, but she didn't carry around answers in her backpack and she wasn't insufferable. She also never got caught. Light was just a moron who used the Death Note to get laid and I never got the sense that he was intelligent or clever. I felt like Mia was more like Light than that wimpy kid.

It was so bad. I tried to be open-minded about it and not expect a perfect adaptation or anything but even as a stand alone movie it was terrible. The music choices were baffling (the Air Supply cover of The Power of Love at the end was particularly WTF) and the characters were awful, Light didn't come off as smart at all and Mia had no backstory or motivation for why she was super into murdering people.

The whole bit with Watari was probably the point the film really broke for me though -- this movie would like me to believe that, knowing they are up against a killer who requires names and faces to kill, L would totally let Watari walk around using his real name. Which is apparently just 'Watari,' since that's all Light writes down. Ad to that the ridiculous scope of the Death Note where a person can apparently *determine where a specific piece of falling paper will land* just by having someone dying at the same time and it was really just a terrible movie all around.

Thank you for saving me from the torture, OP! I saw it come up on my Netflix screen and was admittedly tempted. Then saw the runtime and thought "How in the world can they fit everything in such a small timeframe?". So I put it aside until I was feeling brave.

I'm not a huge "Death Note" fan or anything, but I liked the anime, and I'd like to keep my fond memories intact.

Even critics who admit they aren't familiar with the source material complained about tonal shifts and Light's character being all over the place.

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[ SECRET POST 3889 ]

Death Note movie

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