Earlier today, I watched George Miller's fantasy romance drama Three Thousand Years of Longing at AMC theaters.
The trailer made Three Thousand Years look like it would be as quirky as the very eccentric and enjoyable Everything Everywhere All at Once, but this film fell short of expectations.
Tilda Swinton (who I kept picturing with a bald head during the movie, after she portrayed the Ancient One in Marvel's Doctor Strange and Avengers: Endgame) played Alithea—a divorced London scholar who traveled to Istanbul to give a speech about mythology until a series of events led her to stumbling upon a bottle carrying the Djinn, portrayed by Idris Elba.
Some critics refer to Three Thousand Years as 'Aladdin for adults'...which is true. But I don't recall Aladdin—either the 1992 animated classic or the 2019 live-action remake—being bogged down by so much dialogue. Of course, how else are you gonna explain three millenia worth of events that got the Djinn to where he was in modern-day Turkey?
One thing that I admire about Three Thousand Years is that it's the first film I've personally seen in the pandemic era which acknowledged that the pandemic exists. Scores of people wore face masks while Alithea gave her seminar inside a packed auditorium early on in the film, while Alithea herself was shown wearing a mask while seated inside a public bus taking her back home in the movie's final act. Good for her!
Though this begs the question: Why didn't Alithea use one of her three wishes to end the pandemic? I'm sure that asking the Djinn to rid this world of the coronavirus (but not the existing illnesses) didn't violate his rule of not wishing for all suffering to end. But that's just me.
When all is said and done, I'll stick to watching the animated or live-action version of Aladdin if I wanted to be entertained by a genie granting three wishes to a solitary but headstrong individual. Happy Labor Day to my fellow Yanks!
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