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. (17/04/2010)

Lynne Ramsay was originally supposed to adapt the novel into a movie before the soft cuties Spielberg and Jackson took it away from her and made it into a bouncy castle that made the novel’s author herself want to puke. Esoteric vegan lemonade for parents who need to cope with the loss of their offspring by imagining that they're in a better place now, all of it seasoned with the greatest stereotypes and clichés in the character of Stanley Tucci. As goofy as the film is, I'm all the more annoyed at how it drowns out some masterful visual ideas (no, I don't mean the ones in the heavenly veil, but the dollhouse tour, for example) or entire sequences (the creaky floorboard in the pedophile's house). Jackson is slowly becoming the kind of director here who even adds leaves to the sidewalk digitally, and that's not a good way to go. (29/06/2020)

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)

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. (29/06/2010)

Jackson may be one of the filmmakers who can make whatever they want, but with this film, he has cruelly missed the mark. He has drowned a completely bland and uninteresting story in kitschy images that stink of plastic and are put on the captions of the Watchtower by the Jehovah's Witnesses. Only three things are decent: a) the haughtily sleazy Stanley Tucci, b) the arrival of the mother-in-law, and c) the spy in the house. The rest of the film, though not boring through and through, is a desperately empty spectacle. 2 ½. (01/03/2010)