Scholars and genie-like fabled creatures clashing together to offer up some foul and uncouth commentary on the world around them is a bitter pill to swallow. It is not the lack of satire or subtlety but the in-your-face mentality of it. To speak down to an audience is what Three Thousand Years of Longing does, and shamefully so. There is an immediate overreliance on pop culture that, in two or so years time, will have dated Three Thousand Years of Longing so terribly. It cannot recover from that, much like Stephen King referencing The Big Bang Theory in his latest book, Later, is a terrible point of reference.
Those pointers that films rely on usually have two uses, to make a point or to market a point. Three Thousand Years of Longing falls into that uninspired latter phase, and it is shameful that such great talent can come together to produce so little. Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba are rightfully regarded as consistent and interesting performers, their work here is little more than an uncomfortably dull blip in their otherwise seasoned filmographies. George Miller is given the same run of form, a piece that falls somewhere between Mad Max and Happy Feet, but leaves little room for active or surreal improvement. Living off of the exercise of isolation and scholastic intent is as good as it gets for some, and engaging with that throughout Three Thousand Years of Longing is difficult as Miller has no desire to touch on it.
His choreography and direction are solid, it shows a unique and colourful character standing out among a sea of very dull individuals. They do not feel individual, but nor does the tired, tested Alithea Binnie, a character that would fit more in a The League of Gentlemen skit than it does as a seriously sounded-out leading role. Swinton, naturally, is on that usual form of consistency, but not even the greats can enquire into much of the message when the core message is weighed down by those that think references to the big moments of pop culture from a few years ago, Pokémon and the likes, are a solid switch-out to that of actual storytelling. Although Elba and Swinton work well together, their ultimate chemistry is dependent on narrative tracks that lead to nowhere of interest.
Does the emotive core of Three Thousand Years of Longing really need these moments of surreal clarity? Despite relying on them so often, so clearly, it is never quite the focus of Miller’s piece. This film is never quite sure what its focus is. It does not present anything it does particularly well, and the result is a drab, middling feature. Setting love free exposed as something that people wish to hold onto for as long as they can. The sentiment is nice and scattered throughout the often-colourful world of Three Thousand Years of Longing, but whether it truly works depends on the defenceless, often simplistic desires of characters never given the chance to lean into the story, for the script is too busy pulling out obvious cultural commentaries that take the dialogue and its characters nowhere in particular.
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