I may get some flack for saying this but please read the whole review, and maybe you’ll understand: The Lovely Bones, the latest offering from famed director Peter Jackson, is one-half a good movie. The other half I could’ve done without.

The Lovely Bones is a film based on a novel. The novel, written in 2002 by Alice Sebold, a relatively unknown writer at the time, was met with fairly critical success. It seems like a good book and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it although I haven’t read it yet. It’s film adaptation, however, directed by Lord of the Rings mogul, Peter Jackson, and released this past year falls a bit short of the mark.

The problem, in my opinion, which sees this film scoring pretty low is in its adaptation. See, The Lovely Bones is half about the real world—the murder of a young girl, the search for her killer—and half about the young girl, observing her family, watching her grieving parents and psychotic killer, from heaven. You can imagine that a plot which takes place, 50/50, in heaven might be a little tricky to turn into a film. And it was, obviously. The Lovely Bones is a story that is best-suited for the written word, there’s simply no way around that. But leave it to Peter Jackson, I guess, to try otherwise.

I say this film is half good because it is. The real world portion, the sleuthing, the misery, and the thrilling bits were very good. There’s a whole lot of predictable family drama and it’s done well. There’s mystery and edge-of-your-seat scenes that leave you absolutely breathless. The acting is mostly good, too. Saorise Ronan, who I’ve only seen before in Atonement, was great as Susie Salmon. Stanley Tucci, who picked up an Oscar nomination for his role, portrayed Susie’s killer with terrifying clarity and ease. Riding on the coattails of his excellent performance in Julie & Julia he more than proves he can act, and can he ever. I do have to say this though: Mark Wahlberg, who can’t act his way out of a paper bag, is the kind of guy you cast if you want to make a b-list thriller film. (Think The Happening, folks.)

There is half of a really good, well-developed movie here; it’s the other part that spoils it.

Like I said, The Lovely Bones is best as a book. Since half the film takes place in heaven, Jackson’s idea of heaven, his interpretation of an interpretation had to be brought to life. Of course, Jackson chooses the CGI route which worked well in his book-adaptation of Lord of the Rings, but doesn’t work here. In Jackson’s heaven we get flaring, sparkling colours, heavy lens flares and all kinds of wild animations and transformations. Ultimately, it’s like Avatar meets the afterlife, and it’s much too much.

Now as I book—and I haven’t read it—I’m sure it works well to cast half the action in heaven. I’m sure there’s lots of room for description and poetics and what-have-you but in a film, where it takes mere seconds to take in the kind of description you can spend pages building in a novel, you need something more to sustain things. That’s where Jackson fails to deliver. Not only does he present us with this sensory-overloaded idea of Avatar heaven, he lands us there with nothing to do. Indeed, most of the heaven scenes picture Susie Salmon staring into the sky, or the stars, or the woods. Or just staring. I found myself longing for something to happen every time we saw her there, and being disappointed when nothing did.

To be fair, I liked this movie, despite how it may sound. It was a good film in the sense that it’s an interesting story. But it lacked proper development, on the whole. The heaven bits were way too CGI-heavy and plotless—aimless, even. The real world plot was interesting but if I had a choice between book or movie, in hindsight, I would’ve picked book.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.