|
|
|
R2 DVD Reviews
|
|
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 00:00 |
 If you could cause someone's death simply by writing their name in a book, what would you do with that power? That's the problem facing Light Yagami, as he comes into possession of a notebook belonging to a god of death. His solution is to go on a one-man crusade against crime, but not everyone's happy with his actions...
Here's a strange one for you. This volume of Relight is a two-hour recap of the L arc of the Death Note TV series, with 25 episodes of death and scheming edited down into around a fifth of that time. The Relight OVA is pitched as being the Death Note story retold from the viewpoint of Ryuk, the shinigami who provided Light with his death-dealing notebook - that's not quite the case, though. While there are short opening and closing scenes showing Ryuk recalling his time on earth to another shinigami who craves the same excitement, the vast majority of the release is pure recap from the series, using the original footage. This means that if you've already spent your money buying the TV series, this won't be for you - the short new scenes aren't enough to make it a worthwhile purchase in its own right. If you're new to the world of Death Note, though, it might make for a worthwhile introduction.
Bit first, it would probably be useful to know what it's all about. Light Yagami is struggling through another dull day in class, when a black notebook falls past the window. Come the end of class, it's still lying there, and his curiosity leads to him taking a look at it. The front cover proclaims it to be a Death Note, with an instruction inside that any human whose name is written in the book will die. At first he passes it off as just a sick joke by another student, but something prompts him to take the book home. As a test, he writes the name of a wanted murderer in the book, and to his surprise there's soon a news report of the man's death, just as the book's instructions described it would happen. Armed with his new power, and a sense that he's bringing justice to the world, Light embarks on a one-man killing spree the likes of which the world has never seen - a killing spree that will lead to the involvement of the world's greatest detective, a secretive man known only as L. Meanwhile, in the world of the Gods of Death, one of the shinigami, Ryuk, realises he's lost his notebook and heads for the human world to retrieve it.
Using the Death Note is quite simple: write the name into the Death Note on its own, and the victim will simply have a heart attack. If you're feeling creative, you can write the cause of death as well, and that's what will happen. Light starts off by killing the worst of the world's known criminals - and since most of them are in prison, it's fairly easy for the authorities to spot that something unusual is going on. So far, so good... It all starts going a bit wrong when the investigation starts, though. Enter the mysterious L, complete with personal logo, who no-one's ever seen but who has the uncanny ability to solve any case he's given. Cue much rolling of eyes and an initial lack of interest on my part, as an interesting premise gets turned into a sort of whodunit as L and Light lock horns. It's a little bit different from the whodunit norm - neither man knows who their "opponent" is or what they look like, and as soon as one of them figures out the identity of the other it's likely to result in a death sentence - but I loathe detective stories, and the mythical L falls into a particular category of too-good-to-be-true characters who allegedly never err that also just wind me up the wrong way.
Or that's what I initially thought, at least. It didn't take too long for the TV version of Death Note to move from a seemingly bad idea into a show that really grabbed my attention and became must-watch material. The problem that Relight has, unfortunately, is that stripping the story down to its bare essentials has meant that most of what made the series as enjoyable as it was has fallen foul of the editors' scissors. Most of the posturing between Light and L has gone; many of the explanations of the plans that both elaborately lay to trap the other have also gone. All that's left is a series of set-piece confrontations that are interesting enough but that don't have enough backstory left to them to have any real appeal.
Which means that this disc doesn't even make for a good taster for the TV series, as it doesn't capture the feel of the series to start with. A good point of comparison would be the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex OVAs: there was enough in the way of filler / standalone stories in those series that they could be edited down without losing the essence of what Stand Alone Complex was. Death Note, on the other hand, has very little filler in it - it's dense plot from one end to the other, and losing 80% of that to create this edited version is just too much for the story to bear.
End result: I can't really recommend it. The TV series complete collection has a list price of £60, four times what this release would cost you (although it can be found for much less than that), but I have to say it represents much better value. If you're not sure, better to spend £3 renting the first volume than £15 on this. A pale imitation of the original.
|
|
Reviews Archive 
