Death Note is a Netflix film adaptation of the manga series and as it has to push through a whole story within 2 hours, naturally a lot of liberties were taken. What is not so good is how they did it. The issue isn't anything to do with adapting it for a Western audience but rather how they handled the source content. For one thing, Light has lost all of his charm that his manga counterpart here. Here, he is portrayed as weak, a coward, stupid and lacks the feeling of justice that makes him relatable to the viewers. We get a very unflattering portrayal of Light in the beginning of the film who overshadows the rest of his actions. Death Note forces a romance subplot with mixed results. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that Light is not clever in this rendition and he pretty much immediately tells the secret of the Death Note to Mia, whom they eventually hook up. Mia feels more like the Light we know but is still heavily flawed. Rounding out the cast are L and Watari and some elements of their personalities are kept and they're probably one of the better characters. The plot is basically about Light obtaining the Death Note, a notebook where if you write the name of a person down they will die. There are plenty more rules to it but you can basically manipulate their actions before they die. The original Death Note was excellent because of the battle of wits between Light and L, here, it is non-existent. There's no clever manipulation, no smart logical deductions and L ends up being much more hot headed than expected. The writers have lost everything that made Death Note good in the first place and what we're left with is a generic storyline that doesn't even resolve itself properly in its ending.
