Three Thousand Years Of Longing - Movie Review

Critics Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 5 of 10

When the Australian writer, director, producer and editor George Miller started working on films back in the 1970’s, he started out small but then he finally hit pay dirt 1979 with Mel Gibson in a little film called Mad Max. Miller collaborated with Gibson twice on Mad Max sequels but in 2015 released another Max Max film, Mad Max Fury Road, which is generally considered one of the greatest action movies of all time. His follow up to that masterpiece of filmmaking is narratively a bit off the beaten path, Three Thousand Years Of Longing, a new film featuring Idris Elba as a djinn, or as they’re commonly referred to in the U.S., a genie. Tilda Swinton is an academic who finds the bootle he inhabits and releases him. This film is engaging, interesting, stylistic and downright weird. I was never bored. The first two acts work exceptionally well from a narrative standpoint but then the finale falters as this plane doesn’t seem to know where to land. Where this year’s other ultra weird movie Everything Everywhere All At Once succeeded was in translating all that craziness into a story and characters we cared about and then sticking the landing. This film doesn’t do that. But while cinephiles and critics can find some things to enjoy about this film, many general audiences will feel like they’re spending Three Thousand Years Of Longing for the film to make any sense.

SYNOPSIS - Our film begins with some voiceover dialogue from Alithea (Tilda Swinton), “My name is Alithea, my story is true.” She talks about it being easier to tell her story as a fairytale and so she begins, “Once upon a time . . .”. We then see shots a plane landing in Istanbul and Alithea maneuvering her luggage cart through an airport, when suddenly a short bald man that seems to be shimmering grabs hold of her cart, says a couple things to her and walks off into the crowd. Despite this odd encounter, she goes to her hotel and checks in before heading to give a lecture on how information was passed down through civilizations via stories. She begins to notice another shimmering figure in the audience, this one dressed in a long white robe and with a pointed crown, making him look to be an ancient Assyrian king of some kind. This is the first point when the screenplay veers into outrageous territory, as she keeps looking back to the figure, it keeps moving closer until it finally stands up and leaps out of the audience to attack her. Alithea faints, but after leaving the conference, she goes back to narrating her story and speaks about entering a shop in an Istanbul bazaar and purchasing a small, odd, blue and white misshapen vase that you could easily hold in your hand. Back in her hotel room wrapped in a white hotel bath robe, she does the most unsanitary thing ever, she uses her electric toothbrush to try and clean the little blue vase and unwittingly unleashes the Djinn (Idris Elba) from confinement.

After the two get acquainted, the Djinn grabs himself a bathrobe and the two begin sitting around the hotel room talking, the Djinn telling stories of how the vase came to various people through the ages and how they used their wishes. Tilda Swinton is a phenomenal actress and does a more than adequate job at portraying this historian lecturer, weighing the Djinn’s tales with the thoughtful consideration of an intellectual. Idris Elba as her complement was also excellent at conveying the age and depth of his genie character, his deep resounding voice telling stories about events from millennia ago was as believable as if he was telling us about a local restaurant he enjoyed. As the narrative continues, the film begins to deteriorate, it’s so focused on telling us these amusing stories that it fails to develop any of these characters in a way that we can invest anything in them emotionally or care at all about what happens by the finale. This oddity of a movie continues it’s journey down the rabbit hole of strangeness until we finally reach the unsatisfactory climax that leaves us with at least as many questions as it does answers about this whole world and what in the hell it is that we just watched.

This is a movie about storytelling, from virtually the very first words spoken, we’re told as much and the screenplay delivers, for the most part, consistently entertaining us through the just over hour and forty-five minute run. As I watched, I wasn’t bored, the film held my interested through the first two acts, which is naturally where the storytelling aspects of the film were strongest. As we watch the stories of how the bottle came to Alithea and how the other people the Djinn encountered used their wishes, it was all engaging and I had fun watching it. And you would have great difficulty finding a more original story and creativity present in a movie, even going back to Everything Everywhere All At Once, which would probably run this film to a photo finish in originality. That being said, the screenplay, although fascinating, was a bit too abstract for most general audiences and leaves aspects of the story sloppily unanswered. The short guy in the airport that shimmers and then the ghost in the auditorium are left open ended, no explanation of who they are or why they appeared is given, but later in the film we see them in one of the stories of King Solomon’s court with no explanation. 

After the main stories of the film have been told, the film seems to want to use the three wishes premise to make some comments about humanity, greed, as well as leave us with some kind of lesson about love and happiness. As the character Alithea explains, “there is no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale.” But these parts of the story were by far the weakest, they fell flat on their delivery and didn’t even fit in that well thematically with the first two acts, which is why I say the final act and ending were so disappointing. As I mentioned, the two central performances the film revolves around of Swinton and Elba were very good, I found that their work acting together, although a curious pairing, to be quiet riveting. Of course they’re both excellent actors in their own right. Three Thousand Years was also visually stylish and engaging, although not all of the effects of the Djinn were crisp, sometimes they looked rather lazily composed. But the film itself in general is quite cinematic. Everything Everywhere All At Once was also way out there in how wild it gets, but like I mentioned, it manages it’s craziness in a much more satisfying way, we care about the characters and the finale is satisfying. Even the poster of Three Thousand somewhat resembles Everything’s. But while Three Thousand Years of Longing is highly entertaining and memorable and many of the individual elements are of superior quality, it works out as a whole to be less than the sum of it’s parts.

SUMMARY - You can give this film a chance if you’re a lover of cinema in general, it may just surprise you. There are certainly aspects of the film that are enjoyable and many will be shocked at how entertaining the film can be at times, but make no mistake, these are Three Thousand weird Years Of Longing.