Netflix Death Note Trailer

Before reading any further watch the trailer.

After watching this trailer how do feel? Does it make you want to tell Netflix to return the whole thing? I can’t believe its actually happening I really hoped this was going to be a rumor because it really would lose it’s originality as soon as they make a white person play Light Yagami, and it did. Netflix’s Death Note looks like any old American psycho movie about a White kid tired of the world and would kill anything in his path to feed his ego except now he has a magic book. Honestly we knew this was going to happen no matter what anyone said. There is literally about 4 or 5 Death Note live action movies and Japan takes the win for all of them being A+ work and staying true to the original concept.

Netflix released this trailer and there is a petition to boycott the movie and it’s close to its goal of 11,000 signatures. I think the petition doesn’t really make any sense since almost everyone with Netflix will eventually watch this movie and it’s already been filmed so there isn’t much this petition can do but have 11,000 people say they will not watch this film because of the usual whitewashing of POC characters.

I’m not going to lie but I will be watching this for  Lakeith Stanfield and I’m really curious to see what they do with Ryuk so I have
two reasons why I might actually sit through this movie. I’ve seen a few people are upset the L is black and I will say what did you expect from an american version of an anime? I want to know if anyone really thought that the characters will possibly be played by Asian American actors. We’ve seen this happen over and over and I’m no longer surprised by this.

I want to point out that the characters last names have been changed to go with the characters. Nat Wolff will be Light Turner instead of Light Yagami and that’s not a real big difference and I could see some American naming their child Light its way more bazaar names out in this world I’ll let this slide. I’m really curious to see how this will play out the trailer doesn’t help with anything so maybe as the release date gets closer more will be revealed so we can see how this Light works out.

 Margaret Qualley plays Mia Sutton aka Misa Amane. From the trailer you only see bits of her she’s a cheerleader and I really hoping she stays true to her character. I’m really expecting to see her stalker ways and nothing less. I’ve never seen any of her work so let’s see what she does with this character.

First off Paul Nakauchi is too young to be playing Watari, He’s always been played by older gentlemen and Paul is too young, if the cast would have stayed true to the anime Paul would have fit perfectly as Light’s father but this is a weird choice for this character since he’s always been old. I wonder how they worked this that Watari is younger in this version than any other.

Gotta save the best for last Willem Dafoe as Ryuk. I really don’t know what they are doing with Ryuk but I pray Willem is just doing the voice and nothing else, Ryuk is one of the best parts of the Death Note Series and it can make or break this movie. Who knows it might turn out good and Ryuk is CGI with Willem’s voiceover and the story line is tweaked to make sense or Willem is put in some suit that is supposed to look like Ryuk and we are supposed to sit there and watch this movie set itself on fire for 2 hours.

I took a screenshot of this frame of the video at 0:34 and OMG are we keeping the Kira name??? Why!? Shouldn’t this version translate Kira to Killer? or should God be used since he’s killing in the name of justice? I need answers as to why Netflix couldn’t cast Asian actors for this movie but can keep its original Japanese elements?? I don’t know who thought it would be cool to keep the name Kira instead of changing it like they did everything else but sometimes you have to sit back and watch things burn its way down to movie hell. When this debuts on August 25th let’s make sure Netflix never forgets how important it is to not whitewash POC out of media that was written for and by them.