[Guest post by: Raye Rodriguez]

Death Note is about a straight-a high school student who finds a mysterious black notebook. Inside of the book are a set of rules, the first being “the human whose name is written in this notebook shall die.” With this notebook, he sets his series-long goal to kill all of the criminals on the Earth and become the God of the ‘new world’ that he creates.

As a fan of this series, I was really excited to see this movie. Sadly, I was very disappointed with what I saw.

My first complaint is: Tatsuya Fujiwara is not beautiful enough to play Light. I can let the fact that Mr. Yagami doesn’t have a mustache go, but Light’s being ugly, really ruins the feeling of his character.

Putting casting choices aside, I’m sorry to say, this was just a bad movie. I hate to admit it, but it was horribly boring. The entire movie spans about 8 episodes of the anime version of Death Note. That’s not very many episodes. The movie moves so slowly it’s agonizing to watch. The pace is completely off — there is absolutely no suspense, you don’t care about whether Light gets caught or not, and on top of it all there is rarely any music in the background.

Once L is introduced, the story does speed up a little. He’s probably the only character in the movie whose actions are actually interesting.

I’d have to say the best part of the movie is definitely the last 15 minutes. The writers added to the Raye Penbar-saga, and actually made it a lot more interesting. If you ever plan on watching this movie, be excited for that.

Don’t let this movie discourage you from reading the manga, watching the anime or even watching the second Death Note movie! This is actually one of my favorite series floating around right now, and I highly recommend anything else that’s related to Death Note.