White Yagami

The Japanese manga series Death Note (2003-2006) follows the story of a high school genius named Light Yagami who comes across an otherworldly note book which grants him the power to take the life of anyone in any way if he was to write their name in it. With great success, the manga is then adapted into an anime television series from 2006 to 2007. What made Death Note so incredible was the twists and turns, the psychological gymnastics you as the audience had to do at some points if you wanted to guess what was happening next. Not only that, but the characters were incredibly well written and were always true to their characterisation, this was shown through how they acted and reacted within high pressure situations that could mean life and death. There is not much I could critique about the story, and it could be down to a bias as it was the first anime I ever watched. But being an avid fan of the show, you could imagine my pure and utter disappointment when I heard the announcement of a Netflix exclusive live action American film adaptation.

LIGHT TURNER?

Netflix might as well have spit directly into each of my eyes and slapped me across the face. LIGHT TURNER??? There is so much wrong with what Netflix did by Whitewashing this masterpiece of a manga and anime. Firstly, the whitewashing in and of itself is a major no-go, the film was so incredibly Americanised it wasn't even funny. In the original series', the characters were obviously Japanese (because it was set in Japan), and this was very much visible through the practices, culture, and the way characters went about their days and interacted with one another. These factors played heavily into the characterisation of Light in particular and therefore greatly affected how the plot moved forward. Light Yagami was a popular, upstanding student as well as a genius and god-complex bearing narcissist who came from a respectable family and whose father was the chief of police. With the eagle eyes of a mysterious and anonymous detective called L watching his every move, Light must outsmart him and continue to play the part of a model son and student while committing murders through the death note simultaneously (the potato chip scene, we all know and love it). Light TURNER followed the trope of a typical American highschool loser coming from a broken home. Not only that but any trace of genius that was in Light Yagami was completely lost in Light Turner, with Turner showing the death note to others immediately where Yagami kept it concealed by all means necessary.

The way that this film was Americanised entirely made me incredibly upset while watching the film (there was a fair and a prom? also L had a gun for some reason), it removed many aspects of what made the series special and felt like a major rip-off. What it looked like to me was that Hollywood saw a cool concept and wanted it for themselves, so rather than coming up with an original idea, they used Death Note and made it into something they wanted instead. There was nothing about the film that was redeeming other than Ryuk, the Shinegami. As if Asian representation does not already get its fair share of losses, this one hurt just the same.