Research on film reviews - Rachael Saunders

After looking at different reviews, i found that the review for 'The Lovely Bones' is very useful, because the audience is the same as what we are going for and the story is also slightly similar, with the difference being that the point of view for our film is from the person who is alive, whereas 'The Lovely Bones' is more of the point of view of the girl who has died. When writing my own review, I am going to be looking back at this one because it is going to be very helpful, because of the similarities in the film and audience.



The review was taken from the 'Little White Lies' website.

"The perils of paper to celluloid adaptations have been well documented, and unfortunately The Lovely Bones gives more weight to the argument that it is an exercise in futility. Where the epic strokes of The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a match made in literary heaven for Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, The Lovely Bones is an entirely different animal.

It is not about the fate of mankind. It is the story of a girl, just one, and the death she must accept as her own. But somehow the eponymous bones of our heroine Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, perfectly cast as a girl who is otherworldly even when on an earthly plane) are largely ignored, quite a feat for a story about a dead girl.

Jackson seems more enamoured of Susie’s pre-heaven limbo, a world in which her ravaged body is once again made replete and her murder can be sanitised. This is a place so full to the brim of gratingly obvious CGI it undermines the very real severity of what has occurred, and excises any sense of the simple wonderment in a child’s imagination.

The delicacy and finely-wrought characterisation of Alice Sebold’s novel has been removed in favour of a beyond-the-grave whodunit, subtlety be damned. The Salmon family’s grief is owed much excavation, but this is far from a year of magical thinking territory. Life, apparently, goes on in the shadow of a young girl’s rape and murder, not that we ever really know about it.

Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz barely impress themselves upon the screen, while Susan Sarandon brings brief sparkle to an underwritten role, as Susie’s chain smoking grandmother, while Stanley Tucci is monstrous in a contained, clammy way. Still, none of these players signify sufficient weight to deepen or embolden the narrative.

There are several moments which invest The Lovely Bones with the same genius on display throughout Rings, such as a sequence wherein the bodies of Mr Harvey’s victims are strewn like so many dead flowers across a beautifully-staged montage, finally instilling a sense of grim fatalism, but ultimately these efforts serve only to heighten the sense of an opportunity lost.

Alice Levick"