As one can surmise from the title, I started to regret my decision about 15 seconds after I bought my ticket on my way to the auditorium. There are two other movies I’d rather see at the moment (Iron Man and Harold and Kumar) but my curiousity on how this’ll turn out outweighed the others so much that I impulsively called my friend and we ended up watching Death Note -I blame this post a little too-. No, I was not curious about how the movie will turn out, I saw the two parts ages ago when it first came out with subs. I was curious about the people who would show up and how many -and as an added bonus, if anyone cosplayed-. It was more for the Discovery Channel experience than the Death Note experience.

Turns out there were a bunch of people after all -but no cosplayers-. The auditorium was rather large and surprisingly, a lot of the seats were filled. No, it wasn’t jam packed like Iron probably was on opening night but if I had to guess it had the same amount of people as the second or third week of Iron Man. Of course there were weeaboos abound, my prime interest in coming to the movie. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself -and judge them HARSHLY- when this one group of viewers started to clap when the English trailer for the Bleach movie was shown prior to the Death Note movie -Only shown in theaters for 2 DAYS! Get your tickets now!-. It sounded horrible. That’s when it hit me: Death Note could also be… dubbed.

Lo and behold, when the movie started, I heard English and actually blurted out “What the fuck, it’s in English!”. I really wished I was watching Iron Man at that point. Funny thing with dubs and subs for me. If I see a series for the first time dubbed, I can love it. Prime example being all the Adult Swim anime shows from way back when during my youth. Now, I’d rather watch Cowboy Bebop dubbed than subbed -if only for Steve Blum and Melissa Fahn-. Same thing for subs. Unfortunately, I saw this movie as a sub and I couldn’t help but find faults everywhere. Many parts of this movie turned out to be an example of a classic Chinese fighting film dub. You know, the part where he goes “You kill my master, ha ha” but the mouth is still moving after.

And the voices. I swear the same voice actor/actress was pretty much used for every character of the same age. I heard Light’s voice in practically every scene with a male, but that could just be me. But one dub was rather surprisingly good: L’s. When L was first introduced, for a second it actually looked as if that voice was coming from Matsuyama Kenichi himself. I will not lie, I was impressed -plus, it wasn’t Light’s voice again. +1-. I swear they also redubbed all the sfx too, but that stopped bothering me near the end of the film. I mean, if someone scrapes their nails on the chalkboard enough, you get used to it too, right?

My favorite parts of this entire experience was being able to see Toda Erika and thankfully enough, they kept the SPITZ insert song. I love SPITZ drawing back from my Honey and Clover days. It also helped a little bit that the guy sitting in front of me was a funny guy with witty commentary every so often. I like those kind of guys at movie theaters (read: loud douchebags). I dislike it when they do it all the time, but every so often, they’re golden. Another rather funny part was when *SPOILER… sort of* Light admitted to killing his girlfriend -I say “sort of because it wasn’t in the book? I forget- and this dude from behind me yells “You’re an asshole!”. Of COURSE he’s an asshole, if this post doesn’t prove it, I dont know what will.

But all in all, it was a bad experience and I mostly went for the curiosity. I also couldn’t help but feel superior as I was the only person to laugh when Otsuka Ai was mentioned. It’s time like that that makes me feel like I have to look down on pretty much any fan besides some of those I find on the internet. I paid a whopping $10 to see this movie… and I’m not watching another movie all summer again. I have bills to pay now.

And hmmm, maybe I should’ve stayed after the credits. But enough was enough, really.

Oh and [edit]: Thanks to this, I forgot to mention the lack of ANYTHING being translated in this movie. It was annoying as crap and if I hadn’t already seen the movie, I’d be pissed as hell… as my friend was. He had to ask me so many times what they were saying. I dont even read Japanese but I remembered generally what they were about.