Death Note Collection

Don’t go into the Death Note live-action films expecting a beat-for-beat recap of either the manga or the anime. Actually, that’s a good thing, because many of the things that bugged people about both of those franchises—mainly, the meandering and somewhat redundant plotting of the second half of the story—have been removed. These two movies, taken together, make for a very efficient condensation of Death Note into just over four hours of running time.

For those not familiar with the series, a quick recap of the plot: Young, idealistic law student Light Yagami comes into possession of an otherworldly artifact, the “Death Note”, with which he can remotely condemn anyone in the world to death in the manner of his choosing as long as he knows their real name and face. He’s not only stunned to discover that it works, but that its power goes straight to his head. He imagines himself as “Kira”, the anonymous liberator of the world from the twin scourges of criminality and what he sees as an ineffective justice system. Soon Light is quickly targeted by the reclusive, socially-awkward super-detective L; each of them is at least as smart as the other, and their matches of wits come to resemble death-match games of speed chess.

The first crucial element with any live-action anime adaptation is the casting, and the good news is that Death Note gets it very right. Tatsuya Fujiwara (from the controversial Battle Royale and a veteran of many TV dramas) as Light is able to project both great sincerity and great cunning—the latter especially when he’s plotting terrible things behind everyone’s backs. Kenichi Matsuyama, however, absolutely steals the show as L, bringing to life all of the myriad tics and eccentricities of the character—his affinity for sweets, his weird way of perching and never sitting, and (most importantly) his all-enveloping trains of thought. Erika Toda as Misa has the thankless job of playing one of the less-liked characters in the show, but she makes Light's would-be love interest and partner in crime sympathetic and endearing instead of quite a bit annoying. And the filmmakers quite wisely allowed Shidou Nakamura to reprise his role as Ryuk, the puckish death-god whom Light inherits his Death Note from.

The filmmakers did something else with Ryuk that you’ll either love or hate: they presented him on-screen via CGI in a way that almost exactly resembles his animated counterpart. On the one hand, it’s jarring: anime characters created according to their own laws of physics and biology look downright odd when placed side-by-side with the real world. On the other hand, Ryuk and the other shinigami are merged so seamlessly with their environments that after a while it stops looking odd, and starts looking almost matter-of-fact. I suspect that was the idea.