Here’s an early taste of George Miller’s lush fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing
Of all the things writer-director George Miller has been called over the past 40-plus years of his career, “predictable” isn’t on the list. It’s frequently hard to reconcile the fact that the same man who made the gleefully violent Mad Max movies — including 2015’s beloved action extravaganza Mad Max: Fury Road— also directed the animated dancing-penguin movies Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two, the deeply odd family-movie sequel Babe: Pig in the City, the John Updike literary adaptation The Witches of Eastwick, and the Oscar-nominated historical drama Lorenzo’s Oil.
While these films range wildly in tone and focus, it may be easiest to take them all as the same body of work by considering that they’re all essentially fables. Some are aimed more at children and some more at adults, but in all cases, Miller’s stories are about mythic quests and the people using those quests to figure themselves out.
His latest film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is more obviously mythic than most. In a tale adapted from A.S. Byatt’s 1994 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” modern-day scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton) accidentally frees a bottled djinn (Idris Elba), who regales her with three millennia of his adventures, loves, and losses. In sharp contrast with the restrained excess and practical effects of Fury Road, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a CG extravaganza, full of voluptuous fantasy settings, odd fantasy creatures, and swoony fairy-tale narrative.
In this exclusive clip, a wholly unprepared Alithea gets her first glimpse at the djinn, who has a bit of trouble adapting to the size of 21st-century hotel rooms.
The scene is a very literal translation of Byatt’s words in the story, apart from Alithea’s name change:
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