George Miller is one of those directors who have been part of our lives from the beginning, with films that, in different decades, have marked our existence. Although it seems like he has always been there, his career is not very prolific: ten fiction feature films between 1979 and 2022 (all of them, of course, written, directed and produced by him). In his first titles, his name is linked to that of Mel Gibson, undisputed protagonist of the initial Mad Max trilogy: Mad Max, Highway Savages (Mad Max, 1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2 , 1981) and Mad Max 3, beyond the thunderdome (Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985). Then came the fantastic comedy The Witches of Eastwick, 1987, in whose script he did not participate, and the melodrama Lorenzo's Oil, 1992, but the most surprising thing was his next three feature films, all of them They were intended for a children's audience: Babe, the little pig in the city (Babe: Pig in the City, 1998), second part of Babe, the brave little pig (Babe, Chris Noonan, 1995), a film of which he was the scriptwriter and producer , but which he did not direct, and the two installments of Happy Feet (2006, 2011).
And this is how the filmography of George Miller had remained, who had obtained a couple of Oscar nominations for the scripts of Babe and The Oil of Life, and even won the Oscar for best animated film for Happy Feet, until , in 2015, released an indisputable masterpiece titled Mad Max: Fury Road, a spectacular, uncompromising, visually perfect film that, barring a last-minute surprise, will be its great contribution to the History of Cinema. Although Miller already has a couple of fairly advanced projects around the universe of Mad Max, Páramo, especially Furiosa, a prequel about the character played by Charlize Theron, he has now surprised the public with an apparently small film, but that addresses the root of the Interesting topic of storytelling. This is Three Thousand Years Waiting for You, a film with a lamp and a genie (although on this occasion the djinn transliteration is preferred).
Three Thousand Years Waiting for You is, in reality, an authentic lesson in narratology, set between Istanbul and London, although the stories that the djinn tells generally take place in the Arab world (very suggestive and, at the same time, cinephile is the one in Solomon and the Queen of Sheba). Based on a short story by A. S. Byatt, it tells the story of a narratologist, Alithea (Tilda Swinton), who travels to Istanbul to participate in a conference, and there, in the Grand Bazaar, she buys a jar that houses a djinn inside ( Idris Elba), who tells him his own story and offers him the possibility of making three wishes, since this way he could obtain his own freedom. Three Thousand Years Waiting for You is, of course, a film about the art of telling stories, which offers, on the one hand, the oral tradition represented by the genius, and, on the other, the narratological analysis practiced by a doctor in literature. The djinn belongs to the world of myth, but the literature expert moves in the world of logos, that of reason as the rational principle of everything.
