9. The Lovely Bones - The Murder
After Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson has appeared unable to match the quality of his epic trilogy. 2005s King Kong was a effects showcase that, while true to the original source and its ideas, felt bloated, taking the entire running time of the 1933 version to finally see the ape. His adaptation of Alice Seblods hit novel looked like a more low-key, intimate tale; an almost anti-thesis to his previous grand scale films. How wrong we were. The Lovely Bones is an overlong and at points nonsensical film. It puts a lot of stock in the in-between Susie is trapped in, showing just what Weta is capable of, but these sequences have little depth to them; the film would have been improved with more of a focus on the familys grief than the fantasy elements. The real world is, however, at points brilliant, most memorably with the murder that sets the main events in motion. Stanley Tucci is brilliant as George Harvey, a disturbing recluse who lures Saoirse Ronans Susie Salmon into the underground pit hes spent a long time digging. We actually see little of the subsequent violence; Jackson chooses to focus on Susies increasing unease, slowly noticing things out place in what will become her tomb. Sadly, the brilliance shown here is soon lost once the focus shifts to the afterlife.