Paramount has just revealed the trailer for the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. The film, directed by Peter Jackson, stars Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz, and Saoirse Ronan (Briony in the movie version Atonement, and no stranger to literary adaptations).
I had a hard time imagining how this book would be made into a movie, and the trailer reminded me–strangely enough–of the Harry Potter films: a human world and a magical world running in parallel; fantastical CGI effects, like a giant rose blooming underwater; scary woods, and the hunt for a Very Bad Man.
Meanwhile, the Guardian wonders if the trailer is a bit too lovely.
It also seemed to me that they were really making it into a thriller.
Indeed. I just saw the trailer again–on the big screen this time–and the thriller angle is really played up. Sometimes, trailers are to movies what the dust jacket copy is to a book: they make the product look like something else, based on what some marketing researcher thought would sell. It will be interesting to see what the movie itself is like.