The Lovely Bones

[Bearcata]

I liked it. I cried. I was surprised by the ending, not what I expected. I had read some reviews critizing Peter Jackson the director on doing such a bad job on this movie, considering what a great job he did on Lord of the Rings. I think he did a great job. Loved some of the visuals of Susie Salmon in her waiting place. While the subject of a neighbor abducting young girls is horrific what they showed in the movie is how it can tear families apart, scar them and yet also show the healing process.

[Realitychick]

I liked it. I cried. I was surprised by the ending, not what I expected. I had read some reviews critizing Peter Jackson the director on doing such a bad job on this movie, considering what a great job he did on Lord of the Rings. I think he did a great job. Loved some of the visuals of Susie Salmon in her waiting place. While the subject of a neighbor abducting young girls is horrific what they showed in the movie is how it can tear families apart, scar them and yet also show the healing process.

I thought the storyline of the father and sister trying to find the killer was fantastic. The thing that bothered my was the whole "Susie is in the inbetween" storyline. I guess for me it was too much weirdness... I enjoyed the film and the ending surprised me as well.

[ClosetRTWatcher]

I saw this film over the weekend. I found it really disappointing. I think for me it just didn't capture the feel of the book. My biggest gripes:

• While it showed some of the family healing process, in the book the breakdown was so much more severe that it was much more emotional when they came back together. I thought the mom was much more sympathetic in the movie, prob because they cut out her affair with the detective.
  
• We did not see Ruth and Ray enough to really get the point of their characters.
  
• They way that they transitioned between Suzie and earth was choppy and a bit confusing. They implied that she was able to affect things on earth too much (IMO).
  
• The timeline for the film seemed to be compressed. In the book her friends and siblings grew up over the course of the story, but this movie seemed to cover a few years and then they slapped on a "later on" sequence at the very end. Having Suzie watch everyone continue their lives over so many years in the novel really did a fantastic job conveying her longing and sadness that they all got to move on and have experiences that she would never be able to have. This was a big negative for me - the actress playing Suzie was good, but I didn't get that feeling from her.

I thought Susan Sarandon was the highlight of the movie. She was excellent as the grandmother.

[wmweeza]

It was not humanly possible to show a movie 100% true to the book without it being 4 hours long and including all the marital issues etc. Maybe they could have done a time lapse thing, but yeah, it would be difficult to convey ( showing the changing of the seasons, easy, changing of people, hard ...and would require additional casting perhaps).
I think it was admirably done, though a few minutes of CGI effects seem to be just thrown in with no purpose.

Oddly i did like that they didn't change the demise of the villian. I expected them to throw in a more dramatic ending, I rather liked that they didn't.

[Debb70]

I think I liked this movie more than most people do. I wanted a different ending, but the one they gave, I guess was sufficient. I wanted it done officially so to speak for Susie and the attacker.

I was also bothered a bit by the things that happened to Susie in the waiting place. I don't think that a child in that place should suffer fear or anxiety. That's just me. I thought there was too much of that there for that child.

[tivazz]

it was a good movie overall, definately worth renting