The Lovely Bones

In short, weird. Jackson is a good director, but the story jumps from one level to another too often and so it’s hard for the viewer to build a sufficiently strong bond with any of them. Visually exquisite and emotionally very strong scene from “purgatory" sometimes contrast weirdly with the “real world" (yes, mainly with smokey Susan Sarandon), but despite it all, Jackson manages to hold it all together. Sometimes it isn’t about what story you tell, but how you tell it. (16/04/2010)

Too long, very uninteresting in places, full of images that might have looked better in a photograph. At times it felt like two or three films mixed together. The only thing that worked for me in this film was the music, it was perfectly able to complement the images the film wanted to show me. The pictures could be pretty, but they don't work as a 135-minute film. It can be moving, but so can any movie where someone's daughter is murdered, where the deceased talks about their departure, that final one. Maybe I was expecting too much, something more different, something more suspenseful, something with a better story; this one didn't move along very well, plus the ending didn't add much (was the filmmaker just trying to say "The mills of the gods grind slowly"?). A better 2 stars. (28/06/2010)

Genre mishmash, emotional turmoil, perfect actors, and most importantly, an unexpected spectacle. Peter Jackson has created an entirely intimate story where even the most magnificent special effects shot remains a personal desire. Plot-wise, it may suffice with the simplest premise, but the tension, tears, and magnificent camera did not even let me properly think about it. A complex and evolving experience. (05/01/2010)

If there’s nothing happening, not even a death can change things (screenplay) and less often means more (special effects). The images we see are often beautiful, but also absolutely empty of emotion. It would never have occurred to me that Peter Jackson would end up suffering from the syndrome that accompanies the works of Tarsem Singh. But in the first half-hour it has everything it needs, including emotions, which are so important for movies like this. But this just makes the rest of the movie that much more painful, because this outstanding “prolog" just proves that the movie could have been different. For instance, more in terms of hints instead of spectacular CGI landscapes. (03/01/2010)

I'm not familiar with the book, but the film The Lovely Bones strikes me as a very strange combination of several completely different films, a kind of cat and mouse that is lucky to have good actors in it. It's the most interesting spectacle ever while the main character (Saoirse Ronan and those eyes of hers!) is alive, and then whenever the unusually slimy Stanley Tucci is doing something. The scenes from the afterlife landscape seemed to me rather self-serving and it seems that Peter Jackson just needed to cram digital magic in somewhere. Completely out of place was Susan Sarandon's comical grandmother's interjection, not to mention the unbelievably stupid ending. The biggest unlucky thing about this film, though, is that it offers so many comparisons to What Dreams May Come all the time. And it simply could not come out of such a comparison well, not even if it was better. (25/10/2015)