THE LOVELY BONES: But where are all the orcs?

My first Zip DVD came in the mail the other day and proceeded to sit on my living room table for four days. If that doesn't speak to the mixed reception of Peter Jackson's choice for follow-up to his two epics, I don't know what will.

THE LOVELY BONES is a very, very strange movie, and while I haven't read the book, I have to imagine the emotional fidelity to source material that served Jackson, Boyens and Walsh so well in THE LORD OF THE RINGS is at fault here. One-half of the movie tells the story of a young girl who is molested and murdered and how that destroys the lives of her entire family. This is, by far, the best part of the movie. Unfortunately, the other half of the movie deals with the murdered girl, Susie, as she spends time in a strange purgatory of her own design, as she looks back on her family and her murderer.

This device serves two masters: it gives Jackson some space to create some nifty visuals, and completely splits the focus of the story, with the effect that I desperately wanted to get back to the "real world" scenes (Marky Mark and all) whenever they came on. The "heaven" scenes bear almost no emotional weight, with Susie drily narrating as she prances around in Victorian dress and walking by trees with leaves that become birds.

There may be an argument for the value of the symbolism in these scenes, but it doesn't matter to me if I don't care about Susie. Her death is most dramatically interesting to the journeys of her father (Mark Wahlberg, in an admirable imitation of acting) and mother (the sadly-underused Rachel Weisz), but the film keeps cutting away from the two most compelling characters to look back at what Susie's up to. It's a frustrating effort, and the conclusion feels like it was written by a 12-year old girl who's gone to Sunday school one too many times.

It's almost impossible to reconcile this shockingly traditional movie with Jackson's ouvre. DEAD ALIVE showed a canny knack of approaching tried-and-trued themes through the horrifying and unusual, and his epic trilogy and even the remake of KING KONG showed that he could still wring emotional truths out of the absurd or fantastic. Compared to those three films, this feels like an overwrought TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL episode.