I was surprised by the emotional path I took through this movie after hearing such a widespread lacklustre response to it elsewhere. I’d been looking forward to it for a long time, since it was announced perhaps, just the idea of Peter Jackson doing a) anything on a “smaller” scale than the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong and b) something that sounded so tonally like one of my favourites of his, Heavenly Creatures. I was slightly annoyed when Saoirse Ronan was cast in a role that sounded to me (though I hadn’t, and still haven’t, read the book it’s based on) perfect for Dakota Fanning – I don’t even know now if that was a real rumour or wishful thinking from me, lol – in any case, subsequent viewings of Atonement warmed me to her as an actress.

The story’s a simple one, kind of Ghost meets What Dreams May Come: a young girl is murdered and views the aftermath from an “in-between” place between earth and heaven, both her and her family unable to move on. Thoughts of revenge are entertained, the girl able to a point to “touch” the real world and send signals to her father in particular, a boy she fell in love with shortly before the incident, and a fellow schoolgirl who has a kind of sixth sense. The movie deals with grief, loss, and moving on quite beautifully as well as adding (I’m told it’s been added in the adaptation process, anyway) a suspenseful thread of the attempt to identify and bring to justice the killer, played quite frighteningly well by Stanley Tucci.

I gave the movie 4 stars at The Auteurs site immediately after the credits rolled but thought of it as a high 4; however the more I think about it, the higher I think that should have been, I feel I’ve been affected by the strange quantity of negative reviews when I can really see nothing wrong with the movie. There’s a turn the story takes at the end where I felt the ending was going to be crushingly unsatisfying, but even that is fixed (hard to explain without spoiling things). I would put the negativity down to it merely being a bad adaptation and that all these negative opinions are coming from fans of the book but it seems too widespread for that explanation… am I the only person who saw the movie but didn’t read the book?

Maybe it’s that people measure Peter Jackson’s work now with a larger scale. I’m certainly one who tends to compare a great artist’s work with what has come before and rate relatively, but one has to remember that in addition to Heavenly Creatures and The Two Towers, he also made King Kong and The Frighteners, both of which this far outweighs. Maybe it’s just that there have been so many great movies and “must-see” movies in the past year and this one drew the short straw. It goes into my favourites, anyway. Saoirse Ronan is phenomenally haunting in the lead, the visual effects used to portray the in-between a really pleasant surprise (it’s not really much “smaller” in these sections than we’re accustomed to from Jackson lol), and there are other notable supporting performances from the likes of Rose McIver (a Power Ranger, I’ve just read, making her all the more impressive here!) as the girl’s sister, a quite mesmerizing turn by Rachel Weisz as her mother. It is a beautifully haunting, sad, yet ultimately strangely uplifting movie that I look forward to seeing again, perhaps after reading the book. I really don’t understand the underwhelming response elsewhere.

Tags: adaptation, afterlife, cuties, loss, murder, revenge

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