Review: George Miller Returns with 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' – an Ode to Storytelling

In the years since George Miller released "Mad Max: Fury Road," now regarded as his magnum opus and one of the greatest action movies ever made, something strange happened. The growth of Disney and Marvel's dominance over Hollywood blockbusters, which relies heavily on green screens and CGI, positioned "Fury Road" as a "real" and "practical" counterexample to the computer-heavy imagery of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's an understandable argument, but not an accurate one; "Fury Road" relied on practical effects for its action sequences along with a slew of digital effects as well, and it really takes one's own eyeballs to see how Miller's maximalist filmmaking is the farthest thing from reality. After all, this is the same director who brought us a war between witches and the devil ("The Witches of Eastwick") and a talking pig ("Babe: Pig in the City").

So who better than Miller to remind us of his interests with "Three Thousand Years of Longing?" A treatise on storytelling and imagination, it's filled with fantastical images as it spans millennia to tell its fablelike tale of Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), a narratologist who arrives at a conference in Istanbul to speak about how humans use stories to communicate and explain things. A trip to a local flea market has her discover an old glass bottle she buys as a souvenir. When cleaning some of the dirt off the bottle back at her hotel room, the cap comes off and out pops a Djinn (Idris Elba), who offers Alithea three wishes. The only problem is that, since Alithea dedicates her life to studying stories, she's all too familiar with stories of Djinns being cautionary tales and tries to avoid making a wish in fear of any unintended consequences.

What may look like a two-hander between a human and a genie in a hotel room becomes a larger scaled affair, as Djinn tells Alithea his backstory, dating back to his time with the Queen of Sheba before he gets trapped in a bottle, released, and trapped again over thousands of years. This gives Miller and cinematographer John Seale (who also worked on "Fury Road") permission to go wild with the visuals through lengthy flashbacks, showcasing ancient palaces, orgiastic celebrations, grotesque monsters, and other unique sights (a highlight being an elaborate musical performance by King Solomon). This all serves one of the film's main points, which Alithea delivers early on during a discussion at the conference she attends: Science reduced the power of "gods and monsters," and in turn reduced the power of stories. "Three Thousand Years of Longing" is like a mission statement by Miller, encouraging creatives to work on creating things rather than emulating them or merely reflecting our reality back to us.

It's a message that's easy to agree with, although the film doesn't quite reach the lofty heights it aims for. Like Alithea, whose academic perspective makes her approach her field of interest with a level of detachment, "Three Thousand Years of Longing" can get too aware of its interests to fully embrace and transcend them. The structure of the Djinn's flashbacks begin to wear their welcome by the third time he's out of the bottle, and a last act shift to something more sincere and romantic doesn't quite stick the landing. Still, these are only minor disappointments in the grand scheme of things. It's easy to root for something that swings this hard, and just as easy to be let down when the follow through isn't as strong.

Intent goes a long way though, especially when it involves talent with this high of a caliber. And while "Three Thousand Years of Longing'' does a better job bringing awareness to the power of storytelling than evoking it, it does ask the right kinds of questions. In our constant quest for knowledge and explanation, why must we look at the things we don't know in the same way? When it comes to the intangible, with emotions like love, why not portray them writ large, with as much passion and energy as how we feel them? It's a sentiment that other storytellers should take on more often.

"Three Thousand Years of Longing" debuts in theaters on August 26.