I just watched the Netflix Death Note movie.  Some thoughts (spoilers for both the movie and the manga/anime included):

If you were expecting a faithful adaptation, there’s a lot to take issue with. The movie is more about emotions and revenge, rather than logic and justice as the manga/anime was. “Light” and “L” are definitely not the characters that people were expecting coming from the anime/manga.

I don’t really consider myself a “purist” when it comes to adaptations, and I would actually be okay with the decision to tell a story about emotions/revenge rather than logic/justice if it were done well, but it’s not. Even when people behave “irrationally” and are driven by emotions, there’s a limit to how much stupidity you can tolerate.  The biggest example is how Light never makes any attempt to hide the death note, even after L just told him face to face that he believes Light is Kira.  I don’t expect Light Turner to be as smart/prepared as Light Yagami (who devised a way to hide the death note in a hidden desk drawer way back in episode 2, before the investigation ever started), but you would think that after L tells Light Turner “you are the prime suspect,” he would at least devote a little thought to hiding the murder weapon.

Plot holes (and other contradictions)

Even the ending of the movie, which I actually liked, has a big plot hole that can’t simply be explained by characters acting emotionally/irrationally.  The ending of the movie culminates with L sneaking into Light’s house and finding a page ripped from the death note with names written down on it.  Then, L picks up a pen and contemplates whether to write Light Turner’s name on the page that was torn on the death note, taking revenge on Light for killing Watari.  While this would be out of character for the version of L we seen in the manga/anime, I think this is actually an interesting conflict for the more emotional version of L we see in the movie, and it also plays with the theme of revenge, which the movie seems to be based around. However, this scene is completely undermined by the fact that L did not know what Kira’s method of killing was.  He finds a paper that has a list of criminals, and a description of how one of them dies.  Okay, that seems like the kind of thing a killer might keep (a “hit list”), but there seems to be no explanation for the fact that L, who knows nothing about the death note or its rules, is immediately able to conclude, “If I write Light Turner’s name on this sheet of paper, he will die.” ((I’m ready to be proven wrong on this if someone wants to tell me why I’m wrong; I only watched the movie once and I have no desire to go back and rewatch to confirm that L didn’t know how the death note worked, although I don’t see how he could have given that the notebook was never in police custody.))

This reminded of a scene from the anime, where the investigation team is watching Higuchi (the Yotsuba killer) as he goes through some files to discover Matsuda’s name (the file he actually finds is a decoy with an alias, planted by the police).  Higuchi pulls out the death note and writes the name down, and the first response of the investigation team is, “Wait, why isn’t he killing him?  Why is he just writing the name down?  Is he just recording his name to kill him later?  But why would he do that when there’s such an urgency to kill him?”  It’s not until Higuchi starts screaming “Why won’t he die?” that the investigation team deduces that perhaps writing down names is Kira’s method of killing.

Another issue, not so much a “plot hole” as a missed opportunity: there’s a point at which Light suggests that he might write Ryuk’s name in the death note.  Ryuk tells him that the last person who tried this died before they could finish writing the name (the implication being, “If you try to kill me, I’ll kill you faster.”)  But the first rule of the death note clearly states, “The human whose name is written in this note shall die,” and Ryuk definitely isn’t human, so the possibility of Light killing him with the death note shouldn’t even be on the table.  (Even if Light did bring up the idea out of ignorance, a better retort for Ryuk would be “try reading rule #1 again,” rather than threatening to kill Light.)

I could go on, and I’m sure that in the coming days and weeks, someone will put together an hour-long Red Letter Media-esque video pointing out all of the various logical contradictions within the movie.  However, I don’t think that the movie is ruined by a confluence of small problems so much as every part of it is dragged down by one glaring problem:

Light’s agency (or lack therof)

My biggest gripe with the movie is how it feels like Light is stripped of any sense of agency.  It was one of manga/anime Light’s defining characteristics.  Light Yagami was smart, ambitious, ruthless, but most of all, he was proactive: the plot of the anime advances at a rate according to his choosing.  It is Light who chooses to pick up the death note after seeing it drop from afar, it is Light who chooses to write the first name down to test the death note’s powers, it is Light who decides to start writing hundreds of names in the death note without any outside prompting, it is Light who decides to kill Lind L. Tailor, it is Light who chooses to kill the twelve FBI agents, it is Light who chooses to turn himself into the police to set things into motion to kick off the “Yotsuba” mini-arc, and so on.

In the anime, Light is a character who does things.  In the movie, Light is a character who has things happen to him.

In the movie, Ryuk basically “chooses” Light by dropping the Death Note right next to him when no one else is around. It almost feels like Light Turner is tricked or coerced into using the death note by Ryuk, who tells him, “Go on, if my appearance seems unbelievable to you and you think this is all a dream…why not try writing a name down?”  Even if Ryuk wasn’t actually trying to mislead Light, consider this: when a supernatural nightmarish being that surely has other powers (such as the power to inflict death) descends upon you and makes a strongly-worded suggestion that you do something, can you really say that you chose to do it of your own volition?  Lest we’ve already forgotten, anime Light started writing names down well before Ryuk showed up.  In fact, when Ryuk does show up in the anime, he’s impressed that Light has managed to fill five pages of the death note, already having killed hundreds of people.

Light Yagami seems barely fazed by Ryuk: Light drives the action, and Ryuk is just along for the ride.  In the movie, it feels like Ryuk is the one who drives the action at the start, and Light Turner is just the person he decided to drag along for the ride.

To put it into Campbellian terms: Light Yagami steps across the threshold entirely of his own volition.  Light Turner is dragged across the threshold kicking and screaming. Literally.