Review: ‘3000 Years of Longing’ Beautiful, but Incomplete

At the screening I attended for 3000 Years of Longing, director and co-writer George Miller appeared onscreen before the opening credits and thanked us for seeing it on the big screen, “where it was meant to be seen.” And it was — though perhaps not in the way that fans of his last film, Mad Max: Fury Road, might expect, or even prefer. Fury Road was a big-screen sort of movie because of the way it swept (dragged, launched, etc.) the viewer into its world and action. A sensational-spectacular sort of way. But this? This was more sumptuous-fascinating, an invitation to immerse and explore, like a wonderfully illustrated moving-picture book. (“Moving picture” — that has a nice ring to it. Maybe it’ll catch on.)

Miller isn’t taking you for a ride here; he’s sitting you down for a story. A story about stories, as it happens, told by a student of stories, and featuring a storyteller. My daughter recently pulled down my old copy of The Illustrated Junior Library’s Arabian Nights, and the format — a book of stories told by one of its characters — felt understandably familiar. Because one of my notes while watching was “a children’s story, but with sex.” (The more sophisticated way to render this is “an adult fairy tale,” which I suspect has been done elsewhere.)

ML

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Matthew Lickona

Matthew Lickona is a writer and editor living in Southern California. From 2010 to 2019, he was a film critic for the San Diego Reader.

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At the screening I attended for 3000 Years of Longing, director and co-writer George Miller appeared onscreen before the opening credits and thanked us for seeing it on the big screen, “where it was meant to be seen.” And it was — though perhaps not in the way that fans of his last film, Mad Max: Fury Road, might expect, or even prefer. Fury Road was a big-screen sort of movie because of the way it swept (dragged, launched, etc.) the viewer into its world and action. A sensational-spectacular sort of way. But this? This was more sumptuous-fascinating, an invitation to immerse and explore, like a wonderfully illustrated moving-picture book. (“Moving picture” — that has a nice ring to it. Maybe it’ll catch on.)

Miller isn’t taking you for a ride here; he’s sitting you down for a story. A story about stories, as it happens, told by a student of stories, and featuring a storyteller. My daughter recently pulled down my old copy of The Illustrated Junior Library’s Arabian Nights, and the format — a book of stories told by one of its characters — felt understandably familiar. Because one of my notes while watching was “a children’s story, but with sex.” (The more sophisticated way to render this is “an adult fairy tale,” which I suspect has been done elsewhere.)