Once upon a time, Peter Jackson knew how to do this. His 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures, was a large part of the reason he was given the keys to Middle Earth and allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars as a relative unknown on one of the most anticipated film projects of the last decade, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He had already shown, in the jokey cult splatter flicks of his early career, the kind of effects magic he could work even on a minimal budget. But it was Creatures, a more serious-minded true-story drama about two teenage girls who commit a grisly murder, that showed he could successfully weave together fantasy with affecting emotion.

His adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones contains echoes of that earlier film, many of them quite obviously intentional, as Jackson visually quotes his own work frequently. But the film is such a misfire, such a disappointing collection of failed attempts at emotional affect and confounding storytelling choices, that it seems more like a bad director’s attempt to rip off Jackson’s style than the work of the same director.