The afterlife, it turns out, is cool, but not as cool as "Avatar."
So we see in "The Lovely Bones," an effects-laden ghost story from Lord of the Ringsmaster Peter Jackson, who trains his talent for CGI on Alice Sebold's best-selling story of a murdered girl who haunts her old neighborhood (filmed just outside Philadelphia) and her killer.
Much of "Bones" takes place in the young girl's limbo, brought to afterlife by Jackson and his Oscar-winning army of New Zealand effects artists as a surreal projection of a teen girl's fears and fantasies.
This is reportedly the same crew that worked on Jackson's "Rings" trilogy, and lent their talent to the world of the Na'vi in "Avatar," and if James Cameron's movie left you feeling as though you'd died and gone to special-effects heaven, it's because the artists actually did a better job on that film (it had a higher budget).
Not that Jackson's limboland is unimaginative - it's nifty enough (music by Brian Eno!), full of visual cues and motifs that are not fully understood and appreciated until the narrative has unfurled.
Heaven, or whatever it is, isn't really the problem in "Bones." The problem is that Jackson has the rest of the movie to film, and his instinct for showmanship and grandiosity tramples what should have been a more gently handled story of a shy suburban girl.
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) lives in a Brady-Bunchy home with her dad (Mark Wahlberg) and mom (Rachel Weisz) - it's a world that set designers have taken pains to present as universally familiar and nondescript, and that's in keeping with Susie's teen typicality - her sibling rivalries, her crush on a boy, etc.
Ideally there should be a striking contrast between the exaggerated world of Susie's strange afterlife and her "normal" world, but Jackson is hyper and showy in the early scenes. His camera moves too much, distorts too much, and the Salmons never have a chance to register as a believable family.
He pushes too hard. Stanley Tucci plays the movie's villain, and is good as ever, even behind the set of prosthetic teeth Jackson's given him, lest we forget he's morally disfigured.
The man's a child murderer, for heaven's sake. The movie, for all its showboating, is never as adept as Sebold's novel at handling the atrocity at the center of it all - child molestation and murder.
"Lovely Bones" is perhaps another example of a story that should have stayed on the page. Pushed into our faces on screen, Susie's murder is shabby and awful, and we are reluctant witnesses.