Making the Lord of the Rings trilogy gave New Zealand director Peter Jackson the clout to do pretty much whatever he wants. What he wanted to do was adapt Alice Seabold’s best-selling novel The Lovely Bones: clearly sometimes we don’t always know what’s best for us.

Not that it didn’t sound like a good idea at the time, mind you. As the story of the aftermath of a teenage girl’s murder as told by the dead girl from her version of heaven, the novel mixed the fantastic and the mundane in a way that seemed perfectly suited to Jackson’s abilities… or at least, his abilities back when he made Heavenly Creatures in the late 1990s. Whatever his skills as a visual stylist today, The Lovely Bones reveals the 21st century Peter Jackson has a tin ear when it comes to creating interesting and believable human beings.

While Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is totally convincing as a early 1970s-era 14 year-old girl in the scenes before her death – making her the film’s one saving grace performance-wise – her parents (played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) never once strike a note that makes them seem more than your stereotypical happy then grieving mum and dad. This wouldn’t be a problem if the film was actually about something, but once Susie is murdered by local creep George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) it just flails about in a manner that might be meant to remind us of how life seems pointless after a loved one died except that we keep cutting to the loved one in a very pretty CGI heaven.

A film that’s so clearly about the traumas of a death in the family where the dead person isn’t actually “dead” is an odd combination of boring and cruel; it’s the emotional equivalent of seeing someone fake their own death and then hang around to watch their family needlessly suffer. Perhaps her lingering presence is meant to be a metaphor for the way her memory slowly fades in the minds of those left alive, but if so the living characters needed to be a lot more fleshed out than the clichés walking around here.

This isn’t a film about vengeance from beyond the grave either. Tucci plays George as a blatant creep / sex offender / child killer (making it feel like the only reason the story is set in the 1970s is because today anyone who acted like he does would be in jail even if he never harmed a fly), but no-one has any clue he did it. And that’s despite him luring Susie to her doom in a “secret” pit it must have taken him days to dig in a barren cornfield surrounded by houses in the middle of town.

But does Susie stay watching her family so she can guide them to her killer? Nope; in fact, the moral of the film seems to be “I’m dead, everyone needs to get over it and move on with their lives”. Which is a useful moral in the real world, but in a movie where the dead girl passively watches over her family from a heaven full of stunning CGI imagery, it feels like it’s shortchanging the audience just that little bit.

The Lovely Bones opens in cinemas on January 1, 2010.
You can view The Lovely Bones movie trailer here on TheVine.