The Hobbit: The 10 Most Important Films That Led To It Being Made

8. The Lovely Bones

Lovely Bones Just as Tolkien was the true lord of the literary Middle Earth, Jackson is clearly the main driver of the cinematic one. And it€™s testament to Peter Jackson€™s overruling control of the new trilogy (and the original) that five of his films appear on this list (can you figure out the order). The Lovely Bones was Jackson€™s last project before his return to Middle Earth and was a swift departure from his recent works, channelling more of Heavenly Creatures than Rings. The adaptation of Alice Sebold€™s story of a teenage girl who, following a brutal rape and murder, watches her family deal with the grief from an elaborate purgatory known as the €˜in-between€™, it was one of the worst received of Jackson€™s career, being over long and lacking a sense of direction. The film is an overly faithful adaptation of a novel, keeping many elements others would have exorcised. The only justification for the in-between sequences in the film is to show off the capabilities of Weta and while they are pretty, there€™s no depth to the images we€™re seeing and thus it leads to the film dragging; a similar fault to that with The Hobbit.
Contributor
Contributor

Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.