Three Thousand Years of Longing

Visually rich and thematically dense, Three Thousand Years of Longing muses on romance and possession, as well as the slow death of mythology and folklore at the hands of science and capitalism.

A feast for the head and the heart and the eyes.

Rhythm is essential when talking about Miller. Three Thousand Years certainly isn’t the intricate symphony of chaos that Fury Road was, but there’s an underlying musicality that glides it along.

Where Mad Max: Fury Road was lean, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like a rough draft that should have stayed in a dusty bin somewhere in the middle of a tourist shop.

At the heart of this romantically grand “chamber piece” is a passionate declaration, and as well a sincere defense, of the innate human desire for fantasy.

There’s something rather sterile and bloodless in the film’s approach, with its synthetic and soul-sappingly clean-looking CGI. Plus there’s the palpable lack of chemistry between the leads...

The stories that the Djinn tells are lovely, but the movie really lands in the second half when things get slightly more normal.

The George Miller directorial, with its splendid imagery and sound so reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain trilogy and early Tarsem Singh, is the right kind of narrative to lose oneself in.

The characters in the film could have pondered the link between existence and storytelling in a far more intriguing fashion.

As magical and trippy as Three Thousand Years of Longing wants to be, it gets lost in its own grand storytelling. Part of what makes stories enduring is their success at creating emotions within the audience, whoever they may be.