The box office of the latest from the creator of ‘Mad Max’ has been catastrophic, but ‘Three thousand years waiting for you’ is a fantastic jewel

The news that ‘Three thousand years waiting for you’, the latest film by George Miller, director of all the installments of ‘Mad Max’ (from the iconic first installment starring Mel Gibson to the latest and devastating ‘Fury Road’) had been a resounding flop at the US box office were disheartening. Even before seeing the movie, just from the fast-paced trailer, it was clear that Miller’s proposal, at the very least, would be personal, resounding and possessing unique imagery.

Of course, movies are never like in the trailer: ‘Three thousand years waiting for you’ is a much more thoughtful and less overwhelming film than the trailers suggest, but the boundless creativity of each of its shots, its wonderful message about our need to tell stories deserved more. His debut with $2.87 million on 2,436 screens It is consistent with a weekend, the last of August, very weak in collections in general. And even so, the disaster has been capital.

What George Miller is proposing is a film that distances itself from the high-budget cinema that we see in theaters. It’s got a couple of big stars leading the cast, there are almost no shots without special effects and it tells a story that flirts with fantasy, light drama and even horror. And yet, despite being an absolutely current film, the feeling that we are facing an overwhelming display of creative freedom is overwhelming.

This perception is possibly due to the unique structure of the film, which fits with the message it wants to tell: a story within another story within another story, and thus in a spiral of narratives that overlap each other. Sometimes we see them as flashbacks, others are settled with a series of accurate and evocative phrases. ‘Three thousand years waiting for you’ is a real slap in the face of academic scripts (as was ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ and its hero, mute and docile): the two protagonists are flesh and blood, but they are made up only of the stories they tell.

The thousand and one nights in a hotel room

‘Three thousand years waiting for you’ tells (among dozens of other things) the encounter between a mature and lonely narratologist (Tilda Swinton) and a djinn who, upon being released, grants him the paradigmatic three wishes (Idris Elba). The woman, aware that she has a potential monkey’s paw on her hands (ie, the possibility of her wishes turning against her to teach him a lesson from her) is reluctant. But her genius begs him to ask for her wishes to free him, and for that he tells her his life, a complex mesh of stories within stories in order to make her sympathize of his luck.

The stories of djinn they go back, obviously, to oriental-type fantasy, but with a preciousness reminiscent of films like the great ‘The Fall’, always halfway between the video clip and the narration with abstract images, and at the same time engrossed with cinema adventure classic (a bit in the style, but in a less stiff and ironic key, of ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ by Terry Gilliam). All this comes together in an amalgam where everything has a highly sensorial representation and, at the same time, it seems that it is going to vanish like a sand castle (the highly studied special effects and the production design dialogue wonderfully).

And above all, the film conveys a message about not only how stories shape us more precisely than our customs, our traditions or our punctual biographies, but that they shape us as part of something bigger. It also throws out ideas about how the culture of brief, immediate and fleeting impact is destroying the pleasure of stimulating narrativesmysterious and necessarily incomplete as are those of the djinn.

Significantly, it is that mainstream that is becoming dozens based on stories that have unlearned how to narrate with images (an art of which Miller is one of his last masters) which has burst an unusual film out of all classification at the box office. While we argue in endless Twitter threads about whether a millionaire blockbuster adapts a previous work with more or less mathematical precision, a finding like this, isolated and without depending on franchises, goes unnoticed in theaters. And for that loss there are not three wishes that recover us.