With its fusion of real-life drama and stylized sequences, Peter Jackson’s forthcoming The Lovely Bones recalls Heavenly Creatures, his innovative 1994 take on the notorious Parker-Hulme murder in 1950s New Zealand.

If the latter film’s spectacular fantasy sequences, created by the then newly-created Weta Digital, helped persuade studio New Line to bankroll the three back-to-back Lord of the Rings films, then The Lovely Bones, which is based on the novel by Alice Sebold, might be custom-designed to prove he still has the nous to produce more left-field fare.

Alice Sebold’s astonishingly successful 2002 debut novel opens in 1973, with 14-year-old Susie Salmon telling us she’s been raped, murdered and dismembered. She watches from heaven as her family struggles to cope with her loss, and tentatively begins to probe for answers to the unsolved case.

The two respondents offer very different opinions of the film, with the first describing the CGI “heaven” from where Susie watches over her family with some degree of rapture, while the second reviewer bemoans the jolting shifts between the afterlife and everyday reality, where her father and mother are played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz. The film is due in cinemas in December in the US and January in the UK.

It’s hard to judge much at this stage, but are you looking forward to The Lovely Bones? Does Jackson have your confidence with such delicate source material? Or is the Kiwi film-maker, who has Tintin and two Hobbit films on his slate (as producer and co-writer respectively) best off sticking to the blockbuster material?

The first reviews are in for the movie adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, which was a best-selling novel and a favorite of book clubs. The story describes the aftermath of a child’s grisly murder, told from a heavenly point of view. The gruesome topic will likely keep The Lovely Bones from displacing a feel-good adaptation, The Blind Side, from the #1 box office spot. But Sebold’s intriguing theme seems made for film.

Peter Jackson presents a totally new perspective on serial killing with this unusual and tragic tale of a bunch of young girls who linger between heaven and earth after suffering brutal deaths at the hands of a heartless psychopath. Unable to cut off their bonds from their families, the hapless souls sail through a purgatory-like world, waiting for deliverance. And while they wait, they try an communicate with their loved ones through strange mediums, hoping to hang on to earthly love, as long as they can.

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