The Argument: Before he turned a small children's book into a bloated trilogy, but after he turned a ninety-minute monster flick into an epic, three-hour endurance test, Peter Jackson adapted Alice Sebold's beloved novel into a feature film. The Lovely Bones is the story of a family torn apart when their daughter is raped and murdered by a neighbour, all told from the point of view of the dead girl in heaven. It should be emotionally loaded, but the film feels flat thanks to a reigning in of some of the books more extreme moments to attain a family friendly certification. One of the main defences of the film is that the inbetween, the purgatory where Saoirse Ronan's Susie watches the real world from, is visually resplendent; brightly coloured and expansive, it boasts some cutting edge special effects. Why It Doesn't Work: Pretty images don't provide suitable compensation for a lack of substance and here there's really nothing going on. The reason for that is that, like the Smaug fight at the end of The Hobbit, it's entirely fabricated for the film. In the book there is no inbetween - Susie is already in heaven and it's far from the visual splendour presented in the film. That's why the real world moments feel so flat; Jackson was more concerned with going "ooh, isn't this pretty". What's worse is that the effects aren't even that impressive; it's all clearly fake. That'd be fine if there was an attempt to create something stylised, but it really looks like Weta Digital are trying their best to make it realistic.
