The Lovely Bones Notes

• MC = Main Character
• GH = George Harvey
• Dream World – Doesn’t happen in the book and thus is inaccurate.
• Paramount Logo
• Dreamworlds Logo
• FILM4 Logo
• Starts with a zoom out of a penguin in a snow globe.
• Monologue follows – dad tells main character not to worry about the penguin because its in a “perfect world”.
• Opening titles play.
• MC visits a sinkhole when she notices the daughter of the houses owner called ‘Ruth Conners’ – zoom in on her face.
• Montage plays of GH starting to construct a wooden Clubhouse (Pit) while intertwined with shots of the main character.
• The scene then switches to the MC and her dad building and shelving a model ship in a glass bottle – cuts back to GH digging a hole.
• The main character then goes to school – cuts just before to George Harvey staring out of a window at main character.
• After School scene plays out, the camera cuts to an almost uninterrupted shot of MC walking home across a field at night – intertwined with clips of MC’s family preparing for dinner.
• GH guilt trips MC into following him into the “Clubhouse” (Pit).
• The MC’s Family begins to frantically worry about her whereabouts – cuts to MC being subsequently murdered off-screen by GH.
• The MC’s Family becomes incredibly worried and searches the nearby town to find her, as well as calling the police to help them.
• MC gets transported to what is essentially purgatory where she tries in vain to contact her family and sees visions of the serial killer.
• Detectives search GH’s house, but for some reason finds nothing suspicious about the man or his house (even though they could blatantly see MC’s bracelet resting on a black box by some doll houses).
• They didn’t even search more obvious areas like the utility room or every other room in the house for evidence.
• In purgatory, MC finds gazebo and also note with poetry (Othello possibly)

Relevance of the snow globe: there is none. its just put in there to seem important. The afterlife (also known, apparently as the ‘In-between’) is shown as an odd place. seemingly filled with nonsensical objects that technically have nothing to do with the story. One of the (possibly newly created) character tells MC that your “not supposed to touch people”, even though in a very brief flashback, MC just runs past Ruth and doesn’t touch her hand at all.

It is started in this film adaptation that the afterlife is supposed to be Heaven, though in reality it seems to be more of a state of “Purgatory” for the main character and other children like her. As previously stated, random objects from within the prologue just happen to randomly appear in the In-between, their only reason for existing being to make the audience feel “smart” when they show up.

An example of this are icicles that show up in the In-between, specifically during the summer that’s only significance is to kill GH (The Murder) at the very end of the film where it falls on his shoulder which causes him to trip over the edge of a snow covered cliff. Another example is a gazebo that shows up a few times in the film, that’s mainly linked to MC.

This is because its is meant to symbolise MC’s hope that technically cant be touch because its in purgatory and thus is ethereal in nature. However, for some inexplicable reason, it starts to crumble when when the dad is being operated on. Also MC can see vision of past victims killed by GH, also conveniently with information about how when and where they died for reasons that are never explained. And shock of all horrors, it turns out that Lee Aug happened to be one of the victims too.

Moving back to the rules of the In-Between for a moment. its said that near the end of the movie, murder victims that have unfinished business are sent here until they have revenge on their killers. This would be all well and good, but as MC is being sent to heaven, GH has just disposed of a safe with her decapitated remains inside into the sinkhole before making his escape undiscovered. And to add insult to injury, the killer is taken out by an icicle lightly hitting his shoulder which causes him to trip backwards down a cliff.