Ok, you can probably figure it out. But if you’ve neither read the book, read the screenplay or seen the movie (all of which apply to us; though one of our writers did read the script), you might be slightly surprised to hear how Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” ends or at least how one major character dies.
‘Lovely Bones’ follows the story of deceased victim Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) as she lives in a magical purgatory world, but struggles between her dichotomous desires for vengeance against her murderer (Stanley Tucci) and hopes for her family to grieve and rebuild their lives (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon and Rose McIver.)
What happens to Tucci’s pervy pedophile character, the guy who kills and murders the 14-year-old Ronan character? Don’t read on if you don’t want to know. The spoiler? Told by Peter Jackson himself.
After test screenings, apparently the audience felt unsatisfied and wanted more… revenge.
“[we] basically add more violence and suffering”. “[The audience] wanted far more violence. They just weren’t satisfied.”Viewers were particularly exercised about a scene in which a man falls off a cliff. “We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more,” said Jackson. “We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed.”
So we guess Tucci’s character falls of a cliff and dies, huh? Great, thanks Peter. Honestly we were hoping a winged “Delgo”-dragon from Susie’s afterworld would have swooped down and flown him to justice, incarcerating him in a Swiss prison. Ah well… there’s always “Invictus” which we’re pretty sure ends with Mandela being championed as the supreme chancellor of Earth.
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Don't know if that's better or worse than in the book, where he dies when an icicle falls on him. Not even kidding.
I'd actually want the ending changed as well, since the original character did not just fall of a cliff.
The icicle death of the book is silly, but then the whole book gets kind of silly near the end. The only reason I'm attached to the icicle death is because earlier in the book when Susie was discussing the murders weapons with other dead children they all concluded that an icicle was the best murder weapon because the evidence melts away. From that you could draw the conclusion that perhaps Susie had a hand in the pedophile's "accidental" death.
I think the icicle hits him and then he falls off a cliff. I just read the book last week, but my flight was landing and I was speed reading to try to finish before we deplaned. In any case, I've read a lot of reader reviews of the book which complain about the same lack of revenge against the killer which Jackson mentioned. I believe this was intentional on the author's part, so I hope PJ doesn't stray to far from her intent in trying to please his audience.
(And I think Rhea above is right. I read the passage as Susie taking a hand in the killer's death. It specifically mentions she notices the icicles hanging over his head before one of them falls.)