L is dramatic to the extreme, and Stanfield’s performance is a brilliant compromise between the boundlessness of cartoons and the constraints of physical comedy in a live-action drama. On-screen, Stanfield’s strength is that he can maintain a certain acuity while hopping barefoot onto furniture in a colleague’s home and shoving pop rocks into his mouth. movies both strip that dramatic element from the story, but Stanfield compensates rather excellently in Wingard’s with fits of mumbled conjecture and gallows humor.
In the anime, half of Light and L’s dialogue-and I really do mean half-is rambling, paranoid, internal voice-over speculation, quite like a soap opera. (In the original series, Light initially writes names in the Death Note immediately after school, which leads police to wonder why a spree of local murders is being carried out only at a specific time of day. Fueled by hyperactive curiosity and fistfuls of candy and other sweets, L quickly deduces clues to Kira’s age and whereabouts, though the film conspicuously rushes past any development that would lead anyone to observe a global pattern or deduce a single assailant in these murders to begin with. L is a quirky, childish hermit-a hikikomori in the way of anime archetypes-but he is far wiser than his youth might suggest. L recruits Light’s single father, James, played by Shea Whigham, to assist in the Kira investigation, which is the earliest hint that Light may indeed be outmatched by an adversary more powerful than the death god in his corner.īut Stanfield, playing L, is Death Note’s biggest performance. Lakeith Stanfield plays L, the special investigator assigned to track Kira down.
DEATH NOTE RULES MOVIE
(The movie isn’t totally clear on how, exactly, Light advertises Kira’s crimes.) Willem Dafoe plays Ryuk, the stalking “death god” who watches over Light. Wingard’s take stars Nat Wolff as Light Turner, a Seattle high school student, who goes by the pseudonym Kira for public relations purposes: He advertises his own crimes in order to make vague, convoluted points about law and order.
DEATH NOTE RULES SERIES
There’s already a Japanese series of live-action film adaptations, popular in its home market, which ages Light up a few years, places him in law school, and characterizes him as a reactionary tyrant. Light is an altogether different character in the new Death Note movie, directed by Adam Wingard for Netflix. He’s shameless, and he only occasionally pretends to use the Death Note for anything more than sport. Too bad for the thousands of personal rivals and criminal suspects whom he will go on to victimize, Light delights in testing the Death Note’s limitations.
In the original manga series, which ran from 2003 through 2006, as well as its popular anime adaptation, which aired on Japanese television from 2006 through 2007, the Death Note falls into the hands of a vengeful high school outcast named Light Yagami. If you list a cause or manner of death, the subject will die accordingly. If you specify a time, the subject will die at the given time. If you, the owner of the Death Note, write someone’s full, legal name in the book and you’ve seen their face before, they will die.
DEATH NOTE RULES MANUAL
When it falls from the sky, it’s mostly blank, save for the first few pages, a user’s manual that lists the Death Note’s rules and morbid effects. As far as supernatural artifacts go, the Death Note is somewhat comically complicated to use, but it’s easy enough to explain.