#23 - Death Note 2: The Last Name

Oh boy, I’ve not been looking forward to this one. The sequel to the Death Note movie. Released in October 2006 in Japan it made 5.5 billion yen by the end of the year, after being top of the box office for 4 straight weeks (double that of its predecessor) it received a limited international release but clearly made enough money for the third film: L’s last days to be released. I’m not gonna be covering that film, since it’s not an adaptation of the original Manga and to be honest, doing 2 movies is torture enough anyway.

Like with the first movie, the movie I’m watching for the review is not dubbed. I have actually watched a dubbed version of the first movie and there were a few holes closed up in the dialogue. For one, Light said he hacked into the police database to understand criminals as well as work out whether their sentences were adequate, which makes a bit more sense, only a little bit but a bit none-the-less. But we’re back to 2.0 and 5.1 audios (I still can’t tell the difference)

#21 - Death Note (2006 film)

So, when you’re adapting a story from another medium, how much of the story do you need to be willing to change in order to accommodate the running time and iron out areas where things don’t translate well onto the big screen? There’s no easy answer to this question, but we’re here to look at an example of how a small change can make things go horribly wrong.

I did a lengthy retrospective on the anime based on the manga, now I’m going to take a look at the first 2 movies (I’m not doing that L movie, I’ll explain why in the next review) which came out before the anime also attempting to adapt the manga.

Death Note was released in Japan in June 2006 making a decent $41million in the country, it was later distributed across the world making what I assume would be plenty of money. Given the release date of the sequel, and where this movie stops, it’s fair to assume the sequel was already into production when this was released.

So, why is it worthy of a rage review? Well prepare yourselves as we dive in.