Direction: George Miller
Country: USA
From the creator of Mad Max, the writer-director George Miller, Three Thousand Years of Longing showcases a reserved Tilda Swinton as Alithea, a respected professor in a comfortable white robe, and Idris Elba as a wish-granting, size-shifting Djinn inadvertently released from the bottle that was holding him prisoner for so long.
The film, an uninspired adaptation of the short story The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S. Byatt, is marred by an overflow of images with arguable special effects and also discussions that drag on with convoluted meaning. Overall, it lacks emotion, and only the cinematography by John Seale (he worked with Miller on Mad Max: Fury Road) is something one should take into consideration.
In Istanbul, in the sequence of Alithea’s difficulty in making three wishes for herself, the Djinn feels compelled to tell his restless 3000-year story marked by the presences of the biblical figure Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), the knowledge-seeker Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), and the irascible Sultan Suleiman (Lachy Hulme). With a tone that teeters between delicate and affected, this fantasy drama has no claws to be of more than passing interest. Basically, it fails to achieve what it tries to claim: the power of a deeply engaging narrative.
