Apparently, Peter Jackson can do wrong. It’s so easy to write, and so frequently true, laudatory lines like “Pixar does it again!” or “It’s another triumph for Miyazki!” that when that is not the case, sometimes it’s hard to even fully process it. But with The Lovely Bones, Jackson has fallen from grace and landed hard. Few would dispute that he had an incredible career run this decade with the Oscar-winning, mega-blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the ferociously entertaining King Kong to his name. Both were gargantuan films in scope and ambition (not to mention box-office reception) yet Jackson never let personality or a coherent sense of order evaporate in the mix. Even through the spectacle, it was clear that he knew precisely what he was doing. Here he comes across as staggeringly, monumentally clueless.

It would be too drastic to call The Lovely Bones one of the worst films ever made (though in spots it’s as enraging as any total dud), but I can confidently say  that I’ve never seen such a disastrous adaptation of a book. The film is intended to be the tragic story of the rape and homicide of a sweet, blossoming fourteen year-old girl named Susie Salmon (like the fish) by her creepy loner neighbor (Leo Harvey, played by Stanley Tucci). One chilly afternoon he accosts Susie on her way home and tricks her into the underground clubhouse he’s built. When she doesn’t return her parents (Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg) are torn apart by grief and in the father’s case obsession and rage by her disappearance, which they realize has clearly been a murder.

Or such is the objective. The real murder happening here is of Alice Sebold’s great novel. It’s a read like no other: Sebold’s text is engaging; her grim story also brims with hope, life, and the unforced perspective of a fourteen year-old girl. At the same time it never flinchs away from the darkness at its heart. Where Jackson and his two co-writers (Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens) err so egregiously is in fundamentally misunderstanding what the book is about. Sebold’s book is devastating precisely because it’s about how we deal with loss and sorrow. Jackson somehow missed that so instead of in anyway resembling the stomach-turning melancholy and grief of Sebold’s text, he shapes it into something it never was. The result is a movie that is partly half-baked secular New Age spiritualism and partly a half-ass police procedural.

What Jackson has gutted and what he has emphasized in adaptation defies belief. In the novel, Susie is an observer throughout and her actual time in heaven receives scant attention (in fact if Sebold’s novel had flaws one might be that occasionally Susie gets lost in the mix). The human drama on earth is the true focus. With this film adaptation, Jackson has given her part of the story more weight than any of the storylines of the bereaved. What makes that even worse is that it is a superficial hodgepodge of the storyline’s Sebold developed and none of them receive the true delicacy or care they deserve: in the book Susie’s mother eventually leaves her husband to escape his inability to deal with Susie’s death. Here she returns a few scenes later and smiles abound. This is fundamentally a film that does not trust its audience.

Rachel Weisz (The Fountain) and Mark Wahlberg (The Departed) play Susie’s parents and if you’re having a hard time fathoming that as anything other than a glossy Hollywood depiction, you’re not alone. I am a fan of both actors, but they churn out fairly mediocre performances and hardly appear convicing as a couple (leave it to Susan Sarandon, in a tastlessly written part as Susie’s grandmother, to bring some energy and cohesivness to the part). Virtually none of the acting displays any sort of intuitive rhythm. In her meatiest role since Atonement, Irish actress Saoirse Ronan plays the titular character Susie, and instead of delivering on the promise of her work in Joe Wright’s picture, she feels pinched into place. Jackson does Ronan no favors by having her do dopey shots of yelling in anger and making her read a narration track in a slightly raspy, overly precious preteen girl voice that quickly becomes irritating. The only performance worthy of anything other than derision is Stanley Tucci’s (Julie & Julia) nuanced, progressively menacing depiction of Harvey the Killer. I didn’t find the way that Jackson staged any of the scenes he’s in particulary convincing, but I did find him to be thoroughly plausible with his loser moustache, his akward whimper, and the wobbly voice he conjures up (it sounds like a fidgety nervous man desperately trying to hide something) that is more disturbing the longer you hear it.

In the first scene of The Lovely Bones, Jackson uses a penguin in a snow globe as a good-albeit cutesy-metaphor for being unable to respond to the world around you as Susie becomes.  I was tricked for a second into thinking that more imagery and more thought would be employed. Instead special effects, which were in the service of character and narrative in Jackson’s previous movies, crowd out everything. The depiction of the spiritual realm looks like a Scientology coloring book (that or Jackson took the visuals from The Fountain as his inspiration). Visually everything looks overlit and washed out. And the perfect world that Susie and a girl she meets in heaven create is so jaw-droppingly awful that the trashing of the book almost feels intentional. Jackson peppers the rest of the movie with the perfect piano twinkles of sadness, shocking revelations like “murder changes everything,” and Susie’s little brother inexpicably declaring that “Susie’s in the inbetween.”  The worst is the scene in which Susie meets the other female victims of Harvey’s sick impulses. It’s wrongheaded and embarrasing, as if these girls are all going to exclaim, “Hey, we were raped and murdered by the same man! Let’s hang out!” Like everything else in The Lovely Bones, it’s worse than flat, it’s flattening. I challenge you not to cringe.