About seven years before he entered the pantheon of fantasy with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson made a movie called Heavenly Creatures. Even though it was one of the very best films of 1994, it didn’t attract a terrific amount of attention, no doubt partly because the scenario was based on the bizarre real-life New Zealand story of two obsessed teenage girls in the 1950s who conspired to murder the mother of one of them – but also because of the way Jackson presented the characters of Juliet Hulme (played by Kate Winslet in a striking early role) and Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) and their relationship.

The two otherwise ordinary, middle-class young women seem to enter into their own private fantasy world when they get together, to the exclusion of everyone else. A sizable percentage of all the coming-of-age movies ever made have had a similar set-up, but director/co-writer Jackson makes us see something wondrous and fascinating in Juliet and Pauline’s play-acting. Their fanciful projections ultimately take a deadly turn after their parents object to the intensity of their friendship, but it’s really the girls’ misguided adolescent longing, the secret ecstasy of self-discovery, that captivates us in Jackson’s film, not the brutality.

When Jackson’s new film The Lovely Bones was first announced, we had high hopes that he and screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, adapting the novel by Alice Sebold, might mine some of that same fresh, chimerical, sparkling teenage desire in its story of a Pennsylvania small-town high-school girl, ciraca 1973, falling prey to a sex-crazed thrill killer. Sad to say, the new movie doesn’t come close.

First, a spoiler alert: If you want to come to The Lovely Bones completely cold, stop reading here. The film’s advertising and publicity makes no, ahem, bones about showing the main character, teenager Susie Salmon (played by Saoirse Ronan), moving through a fantastical heavenly glade of brilliant colors. In fact, she spends half the movie dead. How she got that way is only one of the movie’s threads.

Director Jackson and his screenwriters are clearly just as interested in what happens to Susie on The Other Side. And naturally, we have to know what happens with that creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci, almost unrecognizable), the one with the odd yellow hair who’s always lurking around the neighborhood kids, trying to interest them in his doll house and secret hideouts. Jackson makes sure we can spot Mr. Harvey’s intentions a mile away. Trouble is, we can predict every other plot turn just as easily. Shades of The Silence of the Lambs and The Virgin Spring, but precious little of Heavenly Creatures.

The movie opens with the eerie tones of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, and we discover Susie living at home with her mom and dad (Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg), her older sister (Rose McIver), and younger brother (Christian Thomas Ashdale), with live-wire grandma Susan Sarandon always nearby. Young Susie has a crush on a boy at school (Reece Ritchie), but of course it comes to naught. We don’t learn much more about Susie while she’s alive. There’s a scene where the Salmon kids help Dad dump some trash into a giant sinkhole on a nearby farm, and it worries us – surely we’ll see that sinkhole again.

The after-life stuff is pretty awful. While Susie and her ghostly new friend Holly (Nikki SooHoo) are traversing the fields and mountains of paradise (or is it purgatory?) they form a young victims’ detective bureau and spend a good chunk of eternity directing traffic back in Norristown, where Susie’s folks grieve and sister Lindsey does a Clarice Starling number on Mr. Harvey. The idea seems to be that murder victims could take an active role in apprehending their killers from beyond the grave.

Be that as it may, we really don’t want to wander the celestial landscape with Susie forever. It is a maudlin place where everyone resembles relieved sufferers from a pharmaceutical commercial. Ronan, the guilty teen from Atonement, offers a variation in the same key as poor Susie. Most of the cast follows along well worn pathetic guidelines, with the exception of Sarandon’s Grandma Lynn, McIver’s headstrong Lindsey, and Ruth Connors (Carolyn Dando), who sees Susie’s spirit whiz by late one night. There’s a grit, a spark of hopeful determination, in the faces of Lindsey and Ruth that eludes everyone else in Jackson’s disappointing outing.

THE LOVELY BONES (1½) Directed by Peter Jackson • With Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Stanley Tucci • Rated PG-13 • 135 mins • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas.