What's so lovely about this?

If you liked the novel The Lovely Bones you might possibly like the movie too, though I doubt it. To me, Sebold's novel was more of a concept than a narrative. I understand what she's getting at, trying to articulate some kind of palliative for the pain of the unbearable, in this case the murder of a child. But her idea of having the murdered child narrate the story from some kind of afterlife, from which she intervenes on earth to variously protect others from assault by her murderer and ultimately to effect his demise just makes the book creepy. The movie is the same if not worse. Its vision of life after death consists of the murder victims roaming through unpopulated, cartoonish landscapes and seascapes (the vision of Peter Jackson, director, totally pedestrian and devoid of beauty and imagination; didn't the afterlife look exactly the same in that bad Robin Williams movie?), no adults, no society, lonely and scary. If this is their eternity, it's worse than life and worse than hell, it would terrify any child. If you can put aside the improbabilities of the murder itself and the spiritual claptrap that leads a family member - but, oddly, never the detective on the case? - to id the killer, what's left? A sprawling, meandering, never-ending movie with probably the most melodramatic soundtrack ever composed and some editing so bad, so clumsy (to supposedly build tension, it seems to make 45 minutes for one of the characters to lift a bedroom floorboard while the killer pokes about downstairs) that I actually laughed. The bright spot is the acting - all good, including the lead character in I think her first role, and all wasted.