Based upon the popular manga series by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Adam Wingard's DEATH NOTE follows Light Turner (Nat Wolff), a high school student who comes across a supernatural notebook which grants him the power to kill any person simply by writing down their name on the pages. Helping him uncover the mysteries of the Death Note is Ryuk (Willem Dafoe), the bored demon who dropped the Death Note into the human realm in the first place. Of course, you can't just kill scores of people without someone trying to stop you, and in DEATH NOTE, that person is L (Keith Stanfield), a highly intelligent and skilled detective who is determined to capture Light and end his reign of terror. In the latest clip from DEATH NOTE, seen above, Light Turner is confronted by L in a cafe, and it becomes clear that the eccentric genius knows more than he should.
I'm not overly familiar with the DEATH NOTE franchise, but I am aware that not every fan has been pleased with a few of the creative decisions made by Adam Wingard. However, the DEATH NOTE director realized that instead of doing a straight adaptation, this was an opportunity to put a uniquely American spin on the story, as Wingard says that the DEATH NOTE series is "such a Japanese thing [and] you can't just say let's port this over and it's going to all add up. They're two different worlds completely." Those changes will clearly have an impact on the story, while still keeping its core values intact.
It’s one of those things where the harder I tried to stay 100 percent true to the source material, the more it just kind of fell apart… You’re in a different country, you’re in a different kind of environment, and you’re trying to also summarize a sprawling series into a two-hour-long film. For me, it became about what do these themes mean to modern day America, and how does that affect how we tell the story. Ultimately, the cat and mouse chase between Light and L, the themes of good, evil, and what’s in between the gray area. Those are the core things of Death Note, and that’s really what we went for … Ultimately, whenever I say it’s about America, I’m looking at it like, what are the main kind of core issues going on in America. What are the things that people chalk up to conspiracy theories? What kind of weird underground programs does the government have? How do those work in the world of Death Note?
DEATH NOTE will be released on Netflix on August 25th, but you can check out a review from our own Eric Walkuski right now!