This review contains spoilers. The first few paragraphs do not contain spoilers.
First things first.
Do not watch this anime if you:
Hate extreme manipulation of people.
Dislike major character deaths.
Want a love story.
Are not a fan of psychopaths.
Don't want sleepless nights.
Don't want to feel depressed for 2 weeks.
While this anime series is indeed great, in which I mean that every character is thoroughly developed and it is easy to see their point of view, I will have to say that I am not a fan of the tragic ending of this story. I watched this series right after Code Geass and while Lelouch (Code Geass) and Light (Death Note) both have somewhat similar personalities, Light is considered by me a mastermind psychopath while Lelouch is a genius, selfless hero.
This series does invoke powerful feelings of loss and will make you consider the meaning of living and the meaning of justice. This series will also allow many people to see some of the extremes in life, such as how twisted and evil people can get whilst keeping a belief that they are doing the right thing for society.
Spoilers start here.
While Light does die in the end of the series, it is difficult for me to hate him for his ideals. As seen in real world cases like the Stanford Prison experiment, when given power without consequences, people tend to go to the extremes while taking on a "The means does not matter, only the results do" ideology. Light is clearly trapped in this belief that it is up to him to save the world while as we all know, society will still function even with him gone.
Another thing that I have to add in the middle of this is that the anime becomes extremely stale after a while, there is no comic relief in basically the entire series, and each and every scene is just business and nothing more. Though I guess that it does add to the effect of the series in a way that lets the audience feel as if they were living in that situation.
Light kills and manipulates a ridiculously large amount of people during the series and nearly all of those people dies, some of the killed are people that he tricked into falling in love with him, others are innocent people that he kills for experiments, even his father dies because of his actions. Light has no feelings for others (Unlike Lelouch from code geass) and that is what makes this anime feel so depressing for me. In a single sentence, this is what this anime series feels like to me:
A student, given the power of a god, becomes a psychopath, in seek of a perfect world, brings death and destruction to himself and many others
Movie Url:
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/13916-death-note?language=en-US
critic:AAA