The original “Death Note” anime series in Japan remains one of my personal favourite tv series. It’s arguably the most intelligent show I’ve ever seen with some truly terrific writing. “Death Note Relight – Visions Of A God” attempts to condense the first two thirds of the series into a single film. Unfortunately, doing so removes a substantial amount of what made the show so terrific.

Japanese student Light Yagami discovers a mysterious notebook from another world that allows him to kill anybody by writing their name in it. However, he will have to match wits with L, who is the world’s greatest detective.

Light Yagami and L were some of the greatest characters in fiction. They are like Batman and Joker or Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty. The other characters in the show were also great. However, when you have to rush through so much at breakneck speed, the little nuances that made the characters so great have to be sacrificed. A lot of the supporting characters barely get to speak. If you are not familiar with the series, you are just not going to understand what a lot of them are doing. Here, we only get a flavour of what made the characters so spectacular to watch. The characters all still look incredible though thanks to the exhilarating and stylish animation.

“Death Note Relight” is simply too ambitious for its own good. At least the Japanese live-action film was smart enough to only try to adapt the first several episodes. There’s simply too much going on for it to coherently fit into a couple of hours. The beauty of the series was the methodical nature of it with every little detail being clearly thought out. It does offer a couple of original scenes that are fun for fans but overall, this is just a hollowing of a terrific series. This is still infinitely better than the American live-action version of “Death Note” but please just watch the anime series instead of this.