Three Thousand Years of Longing tells a lush story about all stories

polygon.com:

Stories are dangerous things. They surround us, even if we’re not necessarily aware of them. In their primal allure, they can command all of our attention, to the point where nothing else matters. We find them and make them all the time, often by accident, just by going one place instead of another, or lingering long enough to have a conversation with someone else. They are why we see ourselves as good or noble — they’re the root of our delusions and the strength of our convictions. It’s impossible to tell whether stories serve us, or we serve them. There is peril in this. That’s what makes them stories.

In George Miller’s fantasy film Three Thousand Years of Longing, Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist, an expert in an anthropological field of study that examines stories, and how humanity has molded them and been molded by them. This makes her the perfect protagonist for a story: someone who thinks she’s smarter than the one she’s in.

This particular story begins on a work trip abroad, where Alithea acquires a filthy, ancient bottle from a curio shop. Upon bringing it to her hotel room and cleaning it, she discovers that her new bottle has held a djinn of myth (Idris Elba) for millennia. As in so many past tales about djinns, Alithea is now entitled to three wishes.

However, she knows this kind of story, and she cautions the djinn that there are no “genie offers three wishes” fables that aren’t cautionary tales. But the djinn is bound by the rules of the story, and in an attempt to sway her into making her wishes so he can be free, he tells her several anecdotes from his millennia-long history, trying to illustrate how her assumptions aren’t necessarily true. Maybe, he suggests, if she’s wise, she can make