"I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it."t

There were no tears at all, in the end. The Lovely Bones ….. at the cinema I left feeling like it was a good movie. By the time I got home I was devastated. As Flick said, the movie meant so much to me and it was a bitter thing to see essential sub plots stripped from the movie. I'd love to meet Mr Jackson and demand some answers!

First up: Susie is raped in the book. Did they take this out so they could get a 12 certificate? If so, why even bother making the film? The book is horrifying but because of the way it is written, its poise means that the events are not morbid and a horrible chunk of grief that you have to wade through. Instead they are essential to the story because they show how Susie moves on, how she grows up in her Inbetween.

I did hyperventilate slightly when I saw the snow globe because the prelude to the book is just beautiful:

'Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He is trapped in a perfect world."

Susie herself is trapped in her perfect world. I just didn't get the sense that there was a sense of character development for anyone. Near the end in the film, Susie does say that she has to 'let go' of her father but, for me, there had been no sense of her making a journey. Maybe I'm obsessing about the book and about making comparisons.

But I can't help but also wonder why on earth they took out potentially juicy sub-plots out?! For instance, Abigail (Susie's mother) doesn't just disappear and then come back, she actually has an affair with the Len, the chief detective. This, in the book anyhow, shows how the family break apart over time over Susie's death and then when she finally, finally returns the family begin to mend together.

Secondly, Lindsey doesn't just decide to go to his house - there is a crucial scene of understanding which passes between her and her father - they both know it is Mr Harvey but that there is not enough evidence. Their father can't do it, but she can.

I loved Grandma Lynn. I think it was brilliant how Susan Sarandon made her character full of fight and feisty love but her character's development was dropped very suddenly for most of the film, which is a shame because there is a lovely scene between her and Buckley.

The actors were amazing: Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Saoirse Ronan…they all did an amazing job in trying to give their characters as much depth as possible but this was immediately counter acted by Peter Jackson's obsession with CGI. The movie was made empty by the lack of structure and by the amount of CGI all for it to qualify as a pretty, nice 12 film. I'm sorry, but the film would have worked so much better if Jackson had just let the simplicity of the story shine through. Of course, with the notion of two worlds: one of them a 'heaven' there has to be effects (the scene in Mr Harvey's bathroom is FANTASTIC and the rose blooming in Jack's hand is beautiful) but unfortunately they did not support anything, instead they were just Jackson showing off.

I loved parts of course. The mud and the blood running together was amazingly vivid and when Mr Harvey takes the safe to the sinkhole, the mud splashes with the weight and I thought that was visually great. The scene in which Tucci/Mr Harvey looks through the doll's house is plain creepy - you get this huge sense of the fact he is bigger, stronger, meaner than you when you see him looming in the door.

One last thing though…and I don't want to sound like a horrible, twisted, sick person but why didn't they show us the murder? There is a huge build up and then we are led to believe she got away for around 5 minutes, which is a huge waste of time in storytelling. (Which they do in other parts..wasting time I mean, when they re-use the scene with her on the bike again and again…and again!) Anyway, we don't see the murder and I think that lets the movie down: 'Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.'

Peter Jackson tried to contain and dress up this luminous, tragically heart-breaking story, by ironically stripping the story bare and empty and reducing it to CGI effects which really made me very sad and disappointed.