User reviews

Pretty to look at, beautiful at times even, but with all his distractions Jackson has somehow managed to take brutal and disturbing subject matter and leave me feeling nothing apart from vague amusement and disbelief that he actually went there.

I haven't read the book, and even I could tell he completely missed the point. This story, which seems like it should be about the slow disintegration of a family following an unimaginable tragedy, has been turned into a campy whodunnit where you know who dun it from the start.

Rather than concentrate on the relationships between the characters, he fails to connect the dots, jumping perspectives often enough to break any of those connections. It comes across as a set of disjointed episodes with overdone cgi in between rather than a coherent story. The jumps are so jarring at times (Oh look, mom is moving out. Oh look, she's come back again) I have to wonder if some of this is down to the editing and there was far more here in earlier cuts.

There's one particularly tone-deaf sequence where the grandmother (Susan Sarandon, clearly enjoying herself) swoops in and tries to "cheer everyone up". Fair enough there are people who would do that in this sort of situation, but it is so so overdone - overflowing the washer, setting the kitchen ablaze, all to a bouncy rock soundtrack - that I couldn't help thinking of Mrs Doubtfire. Completely off-color for something like this. I was struggling already but kind of gave up at this point, even if I did want to see how far he would go - and the ending is a doozy! After the luminous first half-hour, where I thought there was potential for a serious shattered innocence angle, it's a long sequence of "wait... really?" moments.

The actors try hard, including Wahlberg who I have trouble taking seriously after "The Happening", and I'm pretty sure THEY understood the real story here, but Jackson gives them very little to work with. Actors often say they don't like to watch their own work, because it's almost always disappointing to see a different story than the one you thought you were telling, and they would be well-advised to stay away from this one because Jackson not only changes the story - he barely tells a story at all.

Till now I've never let comparing a movie to the book it was based on ruin my experience watching the movie for me, I believe directors should have the freedom to tell a story the way they see fit. But there is a difference between retelling and hacking a story apart to make it pg-13 and to show off poorly done CG that adds nothing to the movie. There was very little character development, especially with the mother, little explanation for characters actions, and the protagonist's family appeared to be too happy to be living with the recent murder of their daughter in their own neighborhood. The Lovely Bones wasn't near as dark or grisly as a movie about a little girl's brutal murder should be. The transitions between suspense and lighter scenes seemed forced and unnatural, and the entire movie felt rushed.

That being said, the actors fit their roles well, their acting was excellent, and the 70's setting of The Lovely Bones seemed authentic.

The book is great and what makes it so great are the characters, their complexity and how thoroughly they are introduced. Whereas the book excels in creating characters with real emotions, the movie leaves them empty - like shells that have no real meaning to the movie.

I expected this movie to be rather good, and at times it is, but I was once again disappointed by PJ - who seems to only have skill for cinematography but none for the story, the characters and the things that really make a good film. This movie lacks everything that made the book so good, emotion. Editing is poor and what bothers me is that this could have easily been a great movie but the characters were left out, they were in a supporting role while the CGI did the lead roles.

The actors did their best with what they had and it's a real shame that they were given so little to work with. It's a shame that a director who understands nothing of the story, and its importance, was chosen to do this film. The movie is an empty shell, beautiful to watch without any inner meaning to the viewer.

Oh man, Peter Jackson! What a mediocre movie and an outright insult that was! Why?

A mediocre movie because you failed to thrill or move the audience, a patchwork of scenes that didn't believably convey the pain and struggle that could be expected in such a situation. Admittedly Saoirse Ronan is acting nicely but she couldn't single-handedly save this confused film. And outstanding actresses like Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon degraded to minimal roles wouldn't save an incoherent screenplay.

It was also an insult to the fantastic novel of Ms. Sebold! Away with the subtleties, the deep melancholy meditation on life and relations, and the long and wearing healing process that is fabulously described. So, folks, I highly recommend that you read the book and forget about this mess of a movie as quickly as possible.

I really struggled with this movie. I remember seeing the previews on TV get progressively more in depth with the story. It starting out as a "Murder Mystery" to then a paranormal trip of "we already know who done it". And the paranormal side sort of intrigued me and was a large reason I even went to go see it. I was also interested in how a story like this would develop when from the get-go you already know who murders her.

Needless to say, Peter Jackson makes no attempts at directing a movie that actually develops into a plot. It's a horrible plot that has no real direction and seems to attempt at tying loose ends in 'the after life'. So if you're going to see a suspenseful thriller, or a movie where there is some sort mystery, then go elsewhere. This movie doesn't offer much. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the book/movie: What Dreams Are Made Of. A very good movie.

Peter Jackson seems to attempt to be artistic in this film and settles with imagery over anything else. There are some very cool aesthetic scenes, but really, they do nothing to drive the story. Not to mention they do nothing to develop a character. I just don't Jackson is cut out for Planet Earth. Perhaps he should just stick with Middle Earth and let the proper directors work out the realistic movies. He can have his orcs.

In conclusion, this movie was pretty bad. The acting and everything was good, but you're really left wondering what the purpose of the whole movie was. In fact in the end. If you don't really hate this movie, you're just a Jackson-fanboy and should just be thankful your parents still buy you movie tickets.

It really is quite a big mess of a movie: some of it is just imbalanced, but some of it is just plain bad. Not one element of the film is consistently good in any way. Its flaws start on the most basic of levels: the storytelling one. I had not read the novel this film is based on, but I had heard the praise it received, and when I heard the premise, it immediately piqued my interest: The basic idea of a girl helping her family com to terms with her untimely and sudden murder from the afterlife sounded to me like an exceptionally interesting subject to deal with, and what could have proved to be a very unique and imaginative take on the depiction of a family coping with indescribably tragic grief. Indeed, the scenes in the film that deal with the family's reaction to Susie's murder provide the briefest moments of genuine emotion in the film; other than them, the movie never seems to find any emotional consistency. It will go from long and indulgent depictions of Susie wandering around her personalized heaven and meeting other figures in this afterlife that help guide her along the way, to police procedural scenes that portray the detective's investigation of the case, to a comic interlude in which Susie's eccentric and outgoing grandmother takes control over the household while everyone else is falling apart, to suddenly becoming a thriller as Susie's sister decides she will break into Susie's murderer's house in order to collect evidence against him, to a really bizarre scene in which Susie seems to possess the body of another girl in order to bid one last goodbye to the boy she loved. The movie is sprinkled with other strange scenes that lack any coherency or explanation in the context of the film, such as one scene in which Susie goes through a laundry list of her killer's past victims for no apparent reason, or another brief but totally unexplainable moment in which Susie's young brother explains to his grandmother that "Susie is in the in-between": in the mythology of the movie this is true, but how the little brother knows this information is entirely beyond me. Without going into too much detail so as not to spoil it, we are shown a scene tacked on at the end of the film of one of the characters meeting his demise, that it just seems so pointless that I just have no idea why it was included. All of these scenes seem so out of place that the movie as a whole consequently ends up feeling completely cold and emotionally detached: save for a few fleeting moments, nothing at all in the film feels in any way genuine.

This was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. Everything looked like it was lining up to be something truly special: Peter Jackson returning to his Heavenly Creatures roots and telling a domestic and real-world-based story injected with a fantasy element but, for the first part in more than a decade, not actually existing exclusively in a fantasy world. A story based on a critically acclaimed novel. An all-star cast of genuinely talented individuals. What we ended up getting, though, is nothing less than the biggest disappointment of the year. I combed it from beginning to end and honestly, the film has very few redeeming qualities at all: the two aforementioned performances remain its strongest point, while the rest of it just turns out to be a big, self-indulgent, emotionally detached, inconsistent and incoherent mess. Jackson made so many bad choices as early as the conception stage that I still can't believe this is the same director that brought us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so fine-tuned, so perfect, every element flawlessly lined up. This film never seems to know what story it wants to tell: is it a murder mystery? Is it a family drama? Is it a romance-from-beyond-the-grave? I certainly don't know, and it doesn't seem like Jackson does either. Even the writing is stiff: many sequences are accompanied by very overt voice-overs by Susie, which are clearly and obviously lifted directly from the first-person narration of the novel (again, I haven't read the book, but I know it is written in first person, so I assume these passages are lifted directly from its pages) and while the first-person stream of consciousness style works well in a novel, in the film, it just comes across as flaccid, sloppy writing as Robert McKee so eloquently put it in Adaptation. The lame performances. The digital shots. The bad CGI. The overall lack of any heart or passion. I really wanted to like this film, but the more and more I think about it, the more I realize that there really isn't much to like about it at all. And the fact that it's such a missed opportunity and that I anticipated it so much makes it all the worse.

This movie has one of the worst sotytelling I ever saw. Think ex machina every 10min or so. Everything in the movie happens either by coincidence or supernatural interference. Characters have no agency and the story moves forward by scenes of a "post-life" parallel place that have the power to decide what the characters in the "real world" will do next.

The move tries do many things... it tries to be about murder investigation, grief, suspense and yet does nothing properly.

What saves this movie from being a complete disaster is the great actors in it and their perfect delivery. Still not worth 2h of anyones life.

This could have been an excellent movie but instead it became so boring and gimmicky and did not give the impact it should have given. Wasted potential.

A murdered teenager watches from Heaven as her family tries to sort with the reality and consequences of her death. Not really meant to be an uplifting movie anyway, this adaptation of an Alice Sebold novel is almost relentlessly depressing, overbearing, maudlin, and dull. It's a movie that demands considerable emotional investment, but it takes too long to reach its conclusion, leaving you cold when you should be concerned.

The movie opens shortly before Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is killed by a creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci) in 1973 and then finds her stuck in limbo while her family deals with the tragedy. She is also keeping an eye on Mr. Harvey, her killer, in the hopes that someone will catch him and find her body. But just so you're aware, this is not a murder mystery, since we know almost immediately who the killer is; it's a melodrama about how people cope with loss.

So there's very little intrigue to be found, and every little plot development seems to exist merely to move things along to some undefined conclusion with which you may or may not agree. Dad Jack (Mark Wahlberg) copes by lashing out (at items he built with his daughter, not at his family); mom Abigail (Rachel Weisz) opts for escape; sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) escapes as well, out of Susie's shadow. Even Abigail's mother, Grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon) shows up to lend a hand to a family reeling - the fact that she's a chain-smoking, liquor-swilling wild woman gives everyone a jolt, but it's just not enough.

Critics have said that Sebold's novel is probably unfilmable, and they're right. Director Peter Jackson uses some startling visual imagery, but it's really nothing noteworthy (and, truth be told, What Dreams May Come, which covered some of the same subject matter, was far more visually interesting); worse, everything feels jammed in, a square peg desperately trying to fit into a round hole.

But worse than that, for me, was the interminable, uncomfortable scene in which Susie is abducted by Mr. Harvey. There seemed to be no good reason to drag this interaction out as much as Jackson did, other than to make everyone squeamish. Since the thrust of the movie was the Salmon family's reaction - and Susie's experiences in the afterlife - showing us a drawn-out attack scene felt gratuitous and had me eyeing the exit signs.

As for the cast, Wahlberg and Weisz try their best but are overshadowed by the constant shots of Ronan attempting to convey an emotion of some sort. Ronan, who was terrible in Atonement and mildly improved in City of Ember, is given little to do other than look pitiful. Sarandon chews scenery as a vamping lush of a grandma. The only one who shines is Tucci, who's almost unrecognizable as the bespectacled blonde killer.

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones is stylish but insubstantial. While the effects are fun to look at and feel full of meaning and import, the story and acting feel almost tacked on as an afterthought. This is problematic when the movie relies heavily on the story to begin with, because it makes the low-key character-driven scenes look even worse in comparison.

If Disney made a film about rape, death, and the afterlife, it would probably look a lot like The Lovely Bones. Here's a film that already has the enormous challenge of bringing a very difficult, weighty story to life. Thankfully, it has the grandscale medium that is film to bring it to life and a visionary director at its hands.

But despite having both of those benefits, The Lovely Bones still manages to be a tedious, emotionally manipulative exercise. A film that gets lost in its source material but not in the good way, and is tonally all over the place. It takes place in 1973, centered around Suzie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a fourteen-year-old girl who is brutally raped and murdered after being lured into a fortress by her neighbor Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci). Suzie is then transported to purgatory, that space between Heaven and Earth, where she watches over her friends, her killer, and her distraught parents Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and Abigail (Rachel Weisz) as they all try to piece together her death and look for answers in a sea of dead ends.

Right off the bat, I was burdened by several ways writers Jackson, his wife Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens go about handling this kind of sensitive material. Frequently do scenes occur, some big, some small, that feel either out of place or botched in their focus. Early on, when we are seeing Suzie's life as an ordinary girl, we she at one point she actually saved her younger brother after he stops breathing. She hops in the families cherry-red convertible and speeds down the road with her brother in the backseat. The scene is a tad frightening, but the music and quickly-paced editing makes it seem like a car chase. Some scenes are just completely burdened by their own corniness, like the scene when Suzie is at the mall with her grandmother, gawking at the local neighborhood boy at the record store and narrating how dreamy he is with his lengthy eyelashes. Then we get to hear how talking to boys gives Suzie "the skeevies."

It doesn't take many of those kinds of scenes to derail an entire project, but the film finds ways. It manages to take the strong themes of rape, death, and the afterlife and cheapen them by the use of emotional manipulation, mawkishness, overemphasis on special effects, and the PG-13 rating, which I'll address later on. However, the film gets many scenes right, specifically the scene when Suzie is walking home after school and meets Mr. Harvey in a dead cornfield. The scene is awkward and unsettling, the perfect combination for something like this. Jackson parallels the scene with the Salmon's having dinner, wondering where Suzie is, while she's being lured into Mr. Harvey's underground clubhouse he has made for the neighborhood kids, complete with soda, candles, toys, and board games. "One rule," he chillingly states, "no adults allowed."

Another effective scene comes when Suzie is beginning to enter the afterlife and finds Mr. Harvey soaking in a bathtub of dirty water, with her bloodied clothes and jewelry scattered all over the bathroom. Mr. Harvey sits idly in the bathtub, with a hot rag over his face while the background is a painful sea of white. This is as graphic as the film is going to get in terms of what we see, which is already diminishing the impact of the story being that the rape scene is more deluded than freshly-made Kool-Aid stuck underneath a water faucet. This is where the Disney aspect I mentioned comes into play. While The Lovely Bones has these meaty morals and themes, it plays everything safe, never showing us the tragedy at hand and instead spoonfeeding us meticulously-detailed computer-generated landscapes in an effort that detracts from the sadness of the story at hand.

I could maybe forgive all of that if the message I took away wasn't the one I wound up taking away. I'm sure this wasn't Jackson's intention, but with the use of attractive special effects that make purgatory look more desirable for Suzie than the current life she's living, it's as if the film is saying that the rape and murder of Suzie was essentially a good thing as she was liberated from the world that robbed her of her creativity in favor of one with a limitless range of possibilities. Because of this, I am unable to accept the film. I'm also surprised at the fact that women's rights activists haven't lambasted this film, considering the film's seems to be communicating a message that is pretty bothersome in the long run. And don't get me started on the grandmother character here, played by Susan Sarandon, whose character has next to no value and feels entirely out of place, especially when she interrupts a string of depressing sequences with her hustle and bustle.

Jackson's visuals are nicely orchestrated for the most part, however, Andrew Lesnie cinematography is very enticing, and the performances - specifically Ronan's and Tucci's - are commendable. But they are all included in a film that plods along, communicates a questionable message, manipulates you emotionally, features cloying narration, a corniness it simply can't shake, and a handful of scenes handled in a hackneyed format. If anything, this is a good companion piece for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, right down to the portrayal of big-name actors in the bland roles of distraught parents.

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, and Susan Sarandon. Directed by: Peter Jackson.

The acting and plot lines were OK. But, the "imagery" was over done and simply not good enough to merit all the screen time given imagery. As for me, I will pay to see some spectacular scenery, but video imagery is a lot like poetry. Something that is really only enjoyed by most in small doses. And, sorry to say for the filmmaker, here it is just not good enough to give so much time to.

I saw Avatar. Its imagery is so amazing you can watch it for a good part of the movie and be entertained. This movie wants its imagery to be that good, but, it isn't.

The plot then is rather predictable and the results, except for the means the protagonist is ultimately "handled", just goes along without any great suspense or anticipation.

Such a loss is tragic in a family. And it never hurts for audiences to be reminded such things do happen. So, go see the movie for that.. and good acting. But, don't expect much else.

What is it with Peter Jackson? The guy is capable of making excellent movies (BRAINDEAD, the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy) yet, like Spielberg, he keeps making films that should have been great which end up flawed (the KING KONG remake for one). THE LOVELY BONES is his worst yet, a truly disappointing adaptation of a popular novel about a teenage girl who's murdered and finds herself in a kind of limbo while her family struggle to come to terms with their loss.

The film feels watered down and weak. The set-up is fine, and all goes well through the murder and Susie's realisation that she's dead and in some kind of dream/fantasy world that's not quite Heaven. Here the film falls apart with another overly bloated running time and a distinct lack of momentum. I was looking forward to some ruminating on the afterlife, but what we get instead is Jackson letting rip with his CGI dreamscape. There are so many pretty effects going on at all times that narrative drive is totally forgotten about.

Back on Earth, things are a little more interesting, although not much. Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci give the best performances as the grieving father and sinister killer respectively. However, the female roles in this film are appalling, with Rachel Weisz playing an unforgivably unsympathetic character (I hated her more than the killer) and Susan Sarandon's bizarrely-judged comic relief role just coming across as, quite frankly, embarrassing. Are we really meant to burst into laughter at her shenanigans considering the maudlin nature of all that's come before?

The film does feature flashes of inspiration in places, revealing what it could have been. A suspense sequence in which Susie's sister Lindsey finds herself in grave danger is very well realised, but such moments don't sustain the lengthy run time. Wahlberg's nice-guy personality and Tucci's dodgy behaviour aren't enough to keep us entertained either. Saoirse Ronan is pretty weak, I thought, and I was never once moved by her character's plight as I should have been. No, THE LOVELY BONES is a definite missed opportunity and I hope Jackson rediscovers some of his former magic with his forthcoming Hobbit movies.

I loved the book, as did millions of other readers. Tucci, Ronan and Sarandon are among my favorite actors. Peter Jackson is Peter Jackson. But what a letdown this movie was for me! Stanley Tucci states in an interview posted here on imdb, that he almost did not accept this role. That reticence is perhaps what I was picking up on in this movie. He is a great actor, but this role as a rapist-murderer does not suit him. He even balked, during the making of the movie, at having his character assault his victim. But there is much more contributing to the disappointing quality of this film. I just read Roger Ebert's very negative review of the film. He nails my feelings perfectly. Read it. Read the book if you haven't yet read it. But the movie....