It’s been damn near twenty years since Kenichi Matsuyama brought Ryuzaki — a.k.a. the pale, twitchy genius L — to writhing, sugar-chomping life. And don’t even get me started on Tatsuya Fujiwara’s portrayal of that egomaniacal wunderkind, Light Yagami. Sorry — Imagay, Freudian slip from the trenches of fan-rage. The neurons still twitch at the memory.
As an elder nerd — a grizzled, gnarled archivist of media glory — I’ve kept my mouth shut while Gen Z droogs binge whatever digital detritus passes for entertainment. But no more. Not after my buddy’s nephew looked me dead in the eye and said he liked the 2017 Netflix remake of Death Note. That was the final straw.
Let’s begin with the insult of geography. Seattle? Fucking Seattle? You’re telling me this fever dream of murder and god-complexes needed rain-soaked grunge backdrops instead of L.A., the city that literally birthed the BB Murder Cases the “Another Note” spin-off novel? The setting alone is an unforgivable act of narrative malpractice.
But that’s just the starter fluid. The real blaze starts with “Light Turner” — a wet sack of hormonal tantrums masquerading as our once-proud Light Yagami. This version of Light gets in schoolyard brawls, cheats on exams, and snivels like a teen who listens to too much My Chemical Romance. The real Light was a god-tier academic psychopath who would lose his mind if the teacher forgot a pop quiz. Cheating? The man practically worshipped order and intellect.
And then there’s “Mia.” Not Misa Amane — no, that would’ve made too much sense. This “Mia” is a brooding, mascara-drenched void of edge-lord energy, a character so far removed from the obsessed death-groupie that was Misa, she might as well be from another timeline. Misa had a reason to be fanatical: Kira avenged her parents’ murder. In return, she worshipped him with blind, almost pitiful loyalty. Mia? She just wants a kill list and a boyfriend.
Oh, Misa… once annoying, now misunderstood. Damn, I need to rewatch the Shi No Barado music video. That girl had a soul, twisted and chaotic, but a soul nonetheless.
And then there’s L. My beautiful, bug-eyed angel of deductive madness — replaced by some unhinged fusion of Elliot from Mr. Robot and a Banksy dropout. The Netflix L spirals into fits of emotional lunacy and childish tantrums, a stark betrayal of the cold, cerebral titan we knew. And don’t get me started on the pacing — like a car with its brakes cut, careening downhill on fire. If you want real live-action Death Note, hunt down the 2000s Japanese films. Those are sacred texts. Holy relics. Treat them as such.
Even Ryuk, my beloved chaos monkey, got the shaft. He was never a devil — just bored. He dropped the Note like a kid tossing a lighter into a fireworks stand just to see what would happen. But in Netflix’s fever dream, Ryuk pushes Light to kill. No subtlety. No mystique. Just a glowing-eyed demon whispering, “Do it, coward.” It’s grotesque.
And out of the whole sorry circus of miscast dopes and creatively bankrupt decisions, you know what really made my blood boil? They dragged poor William B. Davis — yes, that William B. Davis, the one and only Cigarette-Smoking Man from The X-Files — into this dumpster fire. A man of shadowy gravitas, once the architect of alien conspiracies and Cold War paranoia, now reduced to a two-bit conspiracy radio jockey spitting KIRA theories over crackling AM airwaves while the movie slaps together a slapdash montage of global news hysteria. It’s like casting Orson Welles as a TikTok influencer and calling it homage. This wasn’t a cameo — it was a war crime against nostalgia.
At least they spared us one more crime against god and narrative — poor Rem, Misa’s mournful, justice-driven Shinigami, wasn’t dragged into this cinematic abomination. A small mercy in a world gone mad. But if those Netflix devils do the unthinkable and greenlight a sequel? I pray that Rem stays far, far away from this creative slaughterhouse. Leave her be, a spectral monument to what once was: complex, tragic, loyal to a fault. If they drag her into this mess, I swear I’ll stage a séance just to apologize to her spirit directly. Some characters deserve peace… and this godforsaken franchise has proven it doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
And don’t think I’ve forgotten how Netflix screwed with “Kira.” Originally, the name bubbled up organically — a nickname whispered by awestruck masses. But here, Light names himself. KIRA. It’s like watching a man tattoo “GOD” across his own forehead and wondering why no one takes him seriously.
In the end, the whole production is a frenzied, cocaine-laced slap to the face of legacy. Acting, writing, direction — all of it smothered in mediocrity. And they’re making a sequel. A sequel to this blasphemous trainwreck.
Strap in, people. The slaughtering of what we once loved is being televised… on Netflix.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to purge this cinematic sewage from my skull. Gotta scrub my corneas with the only antidote strong enough to kill the infection — the real stuff. Somewhere in this chaotic tomb of dusty shelves and misplaced sanity, I’ve got my Blu-ray of Death Note: The Last Name from 2006 — a holy relic of justice, intellect, and the sweet, vengeful pulse of the Red Hot Chili Peppers pounding through the climax like the war drums of the gods. That’s how you end a story, dammit — not with a whimper, but with fire and a guitar riff that could peel paint off the walls of heaven.
I’m out — off to bask in the glow of something that remembers how to burn.