Red Sparrow is a 2018 spy-thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence who worked with Jennifer Lawrence (the star here) on a couple of the Hunger Games movies, but this is a very different beast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova (in, it has to be said, a not entirely convincing Russian accent), and Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenarts and Charlotte Rampling star as the film's secondary characters. This one is a pretty big departure from what Lawrence has done in the past, although it has to be said that she's making some pretty bold career choices. I'm not the first one to say that, and for a good reason: it's true. After last year's Mother! it appeared as if she was trying purposefully trying to appear in more "mature" films, and believe me, it doesn't get much more mature than Red Sparrow. The film plays out like one of those schlocky exploitation from the seventies, in that there's sexual violence, sex, violence, torture, and all manner o
Death Note is a 2017 horror film directed by Adam Wingard and stars Nat Wolff as as Light Turner (formerly Light Yagami) and Willem Dafoe as Ryuk. It tells us the story of a bored yet intelligent high school student who receives a note that falls from the sky which allows him to kill people he can learn the face and name of at ease. Due to the fact that a criminal is responsible for killing Light's mother, he takes it upon himself to take vengeance on people who've committed crimes, which causes a lot of problems for him.
I am a fan of the Death Note anime, so naturally I was pretty interested in seeing this film. In the past, I've thought Nat Wolff was fine in most of his roles, and so is Willem Dafoe. Here, Nat Wolff is business as usual as far as his acting goes, but Willem Dafoe is actually pretty great as Ryuk, the death God who follows Light as he tries to navigate the responsibilities he's given to himself.
It's not often that I think a film should be longer than it is (usually, they're either too long, or the perfect length.) However, there are a lot of moments in which Death Note glosses over a lot of stuff from the anime, and because of that the character of Light seems a lot more rudimentary than he did in the original series. We still understand his motivation for doing what he does, but we don't see his transition from normal, intelligent high school student into a corrupt sociopath. I know that films do have to be shorter than TV programs, but Death Note is only around 90 minutes long. They could have easily added another thirty minutes to the running time, and the film wouldn't have suffered at all.
But I can see what the writers were trying to do here. In terms of narrative, the ending of the film is considerably different to the anime. Death Note does have its gory moments, but while the anime is a fairly dark psychological thriller, this version has more of a Young Adult feel, which in my opinion is fine. They knew that they wouldn't be able to include every single aspect of the original story into the film, and that's clearly why it's the direction they went in.
The problem is that pretty often some of the scenes in the film come across as melodramatic and cheesy instead of emotional and engaging. There are too many slow-motions scenes where eighties pop ballads are playing for it to be taken seriously. I think the problem with a lot of the music choices are that they're not fashionable, and most of the people who want to see this film won't be familiar with the songs, which defeats the point of them being in the film to begin with.
There is a bit of a practical problem with the film. It's an eighteen, and I know that it's on Netflix so it won't matter as much as if it was in in the cinema (I'm not saying they should, but let's be honest - it would be pretty easy for people younger than eighteen to see this.) But I can't imagine many people over eighteen actually wanting to see this. So all of the gore which has caused it to have that rating is a bit of a misjudgement.
Still, there are much worse adaptations from TV than this, and people who are looking for nothing more than a breezy, disposable film to watch with friends could do much worse than Death Note.
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