Death Note Blu-Ray Review

• 7th Sep 2010

From a popular manga comes a film that by all rights should probably have been made as more of a scare fest horror. Well by that I mean that film producers looking to sucker people into theatres with fake scares and pointless bloodletting would probably have demanded that this script contain more of that so, it is with sheer admiration, that this creepy premise works with little to no blood, no scares but a high amount of tension.

Kira is a figure who becomes known to the public for somehow having the ability to make people drop dead of a heart attack. For the better part it is criminals that he is subjecting this fate too. Even so, it is still dividing the public opinion about whether he is a monster or note and freaking the police out on how this killer works and what his true identity is.

That identity lies in the figure of student Light (Tatsuya Fujiwara). Humorously he is also the police chief’s son. The source of his power comes from the titular book which literally falls from the sky. The note book has rules. You write a name inside of a person that you have seen and they will die. So under the guise of Kira, Light starts to clean up society and drop crime.

With the police and, eventually, the FBI on his tail his work starts to cross lines in order to save his own identity. This is made even more troublesome when the police invite the mysterious L (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) onto the case to help find out what is going on. From here on in it becomes a battle of wits between the two as they become aware of each other.

Death Note is an odd film built around a very bizarre but ultimately engrossing idea. In the wrong hands it could have been preposterous and nothing more (did I not mention that upon touching the death note you can then see the Angel of Death. Who in this film is an animated Crow meets Joker). In fact, it may be even harder for them to update this film in western cinema but thankfully, the tone is treated with a pinch of humour and the set pieces are dealt with in great humanity making them all the more effective.

Perhaps we could have seen a little more of the conniving Light and the reasoning for his actions. Instead we mainly see him reacting to the people who are out to stop him. The show though is stolen by the character of L who is so flamboyant and brilliantly played; just watching his every slowly, but purposely made move is thrill. He also gets to deliver a mouth watering cliff-hanger of an ending that will have you hunting down the second part immediately.

There is a disc of extras as well including ‘making of’ materials, trailers, production videos and press conferences.

This is released as part of a 4 disc set along with Death Note: The Last Name.

Steven Hurst