The full trailer for The Lovely Bones has been released, bringing with it Peter Jackson's often surreal vision of the afterlife. It's a place where fantastical dreams spring to life, and where the living world continues to haunt the dead.
Yesterday, we looked at the teaser for The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel about a murdered girl, Susie Salmon, who watches her surviving family from a personal heaven. Sebold's concept of heaven as an intensely personal place that manifested your conscious and unconscious desires was often the most fascinating part of the book, and the most frustrating in its lack of vividness. But Jackson has molded Sebold's ideas into a dynamic dreamscape, filled with brilliantly colored beaches, mountains, and glacial lakes that could never exist in the real world, juxtaposed against the simple reality of Susie's grieving family.
Also apparent is the way the living and the dead continue to haunt one another. As in Sebold's book, the trailer shows Susie's impact on the living world as her ghost brushes by Ruth Connors and she calls out to her father from the afterlife. But here, we see that Susie's world is altered by the actions of her friends and family. A drawing by her brother seems to come to life as a mountain sunrise. Her father breaking a ship in a bottle causes an exaggerated version of the same captive ship to shatter on the shores. And the memories of the place where she died continue to haunt her afterlife. It's a visually intriguing set of choices to be sure, and hopefully they will also make Susie's posthumous coming of age all the more convincing.