The Story of a Djinn

George Miller will forever be known as "the Mad MaxStarted with a single 1970s Australian exploitation flick (a popular genre in the country at the time), the Mad Max series went on to spawn three sequels, an entire genre, style, and what many consider the greatest action film of all time, Fury Road. Not bad from a little low-budget film about cars smashing each other after the fall of society. guy." He's the writer / director who created that franchise, and while he has crafted a number of ocher successful films -- Lorenzo's Oil, Babe, Happy Feet -- he will forever be known for his series of Aussie Exploitation action films. Mad Max is an indelible part of the pop-culture landscape, and Miller is the man responsible for that series.

I do think, however, that it's when you explore his films outside of Max that you find the director's true art. Don't get me wrong, there is absolute artistry on display in the Mad Max series (with the constantly thrill-ride of Mad Max: Fury Road being a high point not just for that series but for action cinema as a whole), but there are stories that simply can't be told in the Mad Max universe, and it's when Miller can step outside that franchise that it feels like he can really spread out and explore is wildest ideas. Barnyard animals that talk seems so basic but Miller's Babe films are spectacular. Penguins that can dance? With Miller on board the Happy Feet films became huge successes.

Produced during the COVID pandemic and released just as people were slowly, tentatively coming back to movie theaters (a process that took more than a year to really shift anywhere back towards normal numbers), Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing likely wouldn't have been a huge success even in the best of circumstances. It's an odd movie, episodes and fantastical, almost like his version of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (although not as silly). It delights the eyes while providing a wild and interesting story of love, loss, and yearning. But it's not a film you would expect people to flock to, and audiences in 2022 absolutely did not. On a budget of $60 Mil, Three Thousand Years of Longing made only $20 Mil at the Box Office. It was a bomb, quickly shuffled away by most.

But the film is one of Miller's more creative efforts. Focusing on a Djinn (Idris Elba) who has been trapped in his bottle for the better part of 3,000 years, the film provides sumptuous visuals wrapped around a an interesting fantasy tale. I don't think the film is perfect -- there are plot ideas left dangling, concepts left unexplored, and a last cat that feels rushed in comparison to the paces of the first two acts -- but the overall production is a meticulous labor of love. There's a lot to like about the film, which is why so many critics praised it. I just don't think anyone could have expected this film to actually succeed, especially not in 2022.

Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a professor of mythology and literature. She studies the stories of the past to see how those tales were used to explain the world as those people saw it. She knows that the creatures and gods depicted in those old stories don't exist, that their stories were supplanted by scientific explanation as people learned more about their own universe. Gods and monsters don't exist, can't exist, and there's always a reasonable explanation for everything.

While on a lecture visit to Istanbul, Alithea finds a glass bottle buried in a pile of other junk in a random store. Grabbing it, she takes the jar back to her hotel room and cleans it up, releasing the djinn stored within. Despite her own lack of belief in the fantastic, the djinn is very real, and very large, in her room. But she starts talking to him, and he begins to explain his own story, from his days as the consort to the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to acting as the wish granter for a slave, and his time being around, and falling for, a young genius trapped in a life she hates by her own gender. And during these stories, Alithea finds herself falling for this djinn, to the point where, finally, she decides what her own wishes would be: love.

At its core, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a love story. It has many fantastic trappings, with lush sets and amazing costumes, but the core story is about one djinn (Elba) who has loved many women over his time but has never found the one who would properly care for him in return. Meanwhile, Alithea has been burned by love in the past and has set herself in a life where she doesn't feel like she needs love at all... except she does. And it's with this being of light and magic, a creature she wouldn't have thought could truly exist, that she finally finds the love of her lifetime. For everything else in the film, it's about love.

But it is a sumptuous story that unfolds around these two beings falling for each other. From the kingdom (queendom?) of Sheba, to the Palace of Suleiman, and then coastal house of a wife name Zefir, the sets for this production are wonderful. They are, obviously, supplemented by a fair bit of CGI to heighten the visuals -- color contrast raised, hue brightened, past wonders recreated -- but that never stops it from being a feast for the eyes. And the same goes for the wonderful costuming, which absolutely nails the details of the various time periods with richness and delight. Every frame of the film, as they say, is a painting and you can see every dollar of the production in the set design and costuming for the film.

And that doesn't even touch the wonderfully warm performances from Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. These are two of the finest actors of this era and to have them together, sharing the screen with effortless chemistry and charisma, makes even the quietest scenes fun to watch. Bear in mind that while the Djinn recounts his various adventures, he and Alithea sit on a bed in a hotel, just chatting. Those scenes shouldn't hold up to the wonders of the past, but they do, all thanks to these two amazing actors. It's great.

Where the film loses traction for me is in the last act. Up until this point Alithea has been questioning the djinn, never truly trusting him because he could be, as she wisely points out, a trickster djinn whose wishes will only lead to ruin. But after the story of Zefir, Alithea suddenly gives in and wishes for love. It's like a switch has been flipped and while the djinns stories were great, this is a character shift that doesn't entirely feel earned. Her falling for the djinn in the space of a few hours after hearing his tales feels out of character for considering how the film has presented Alithea up to that point. Swinton and Elba sell it for all its worth, and that's why it works at all, but something does feel off about this last act shift.

At the same time, once the film goes all in on Alithea and the djinn, all other fantasy creatures are forgotten and ignored. Before she rubbed the lamp, Alithea was seeing weird creatures on the periphery, chalking it up to her own imagination. One would think that with a djinn now in her life she would go out and search for these other beings, or that she's find a way to communicate with them, or them her, and that her shift to trusting the djinn would cause larger shifts in her life. It doesn't, though, and this feels like the film decides to ignore its own setup just to focus on the love story above all else. That leaves the third act feeling rushed and weird, like the film doesn't really care about all its details at all. It just wants to get to the good bit at the end, and that lessens that ending by somehow not staying entirely true to its own world.

I did enjoy Three Thousand Years of Longing, finding it to be a well crafted and lovingly made fantasy tale. But the last act troubles do keep the film from greatness. A better version of that act would build the film up even further and turn it into a cathartic release for both Alithea and the djinn. Instead, while their love story comes to a happy conclusion, it's hard to feel the joy the film tells us these two characters have found. The film should wrap us up and sweep us away in this grand tale of love, and it doesn't, and that's all because the third act isn't as good as it needed to be. It keeps a film that could have been a masterpiece from reaching its potential, ending up as a decently made, okay love story. Considering the love put into the crafting of this film I expected more.