THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is a provocative fantasy about a female literary scholar who, while taking part in a conference in Istanbul, discovers a genie or djinn who offers her three wishes. THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING develops into a touching love story between the literary scholar and the genie, but it’s bogged down by three lengthy flashbacks about the genie’s personal life story, and it has a very strong Non-Christian, Romantic worldview that includes sexual immorality, explicit nudity and a false, politically correct perspective on reality, metaphysics, theology, religion, storytelling, and science.

Tilda Swinton plays the literary scholar. Alithea is a narratologist, a person who studies stories, especially their narrative structure, what they share in common and where they differ, and the ways “in which people perceive, create and are influenced by them” (Arkady Martine). She leaves her home in London to attend a conference in Istanbul, where she discovers a genie, played by Idris Elba, who offers her three wishes.

Alithea has read many stories where the genie, or djinn, tricked the person. So, she’s reluctant to take the genie up on his offer to give her whatever her heart desires.

The genie assures Alithea his intentions are pure and that he only wants her to make her three wishes so he can be free and return to the land where genies live. To set her mind at ease, he tells her his life story. His story begins in Sheba, where he was an advisor to the Queen of Sheba, who he says was part human and part genie. King Solomon came to the Queen’s court to seduce her, the genie tells Alithea, and Solomon used black magic to imprison him in a brass bottle, which ends up in the ocean.

Twenty-five hundred years later, the bottle ends up in the sultan’s court of the Ottomon Empire. The genie is freed from his bottle by the sultan’s eldest of two brothers, but no wish gets made and the bottle is closed. Invisible, the genie watches as the eldest son becomes sultan, goes off to war and then returns while his mother locks his younger brother up in a room filled with the fat naked women from his harem.

Eventually, the genie is locked up again in the bottle, and 200 years or so later, he’s released by Zefir, the youngest of three wives of a middle-aged Muslim merchant. Zefir loves books, so her wish to have all the knowledge possible in the world. So, the genie begns to teach her everything about everything. As he does, he falls in love with her, but one day he angers her, and she wishes him into a new bottle.

After hearing the three stories, Alithea is ready to make her first wish.

Directed by George Miller, the creator of the MAD MAX movies, and based on a 1994 short story, THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING develops into a touching love story between the literary scholar and the genie. However, the movie is bogged down by the three flashback stories the genie tells about his life.

Ultimately, the movie promotes a Romantic Non-Christian worldview, which contains a false, politically correct theology about the nature of reality, metaphysics, religion, storytelling, and science. For example, the genie directly says that the biblical story about the Queen of Sheba coming to visit King Solomon is false. The movie falsely depicts Solomon as a purveyor of black magic. Also, earlier in the movie, the heroine makes a false distinction between stories and myths and science. She claims myths or stories about religion and gods are always non-scientific, if not anti-scientific, and anything having to do with science is not religious.

In reality, of course, religious stories aren’t inherently unscientific. For example, the story of David versus Goliath in the Bible involves a stone from a slingshot that embeds itself into Goliath’s forehead and kills him. There’s nothing unscientific about that! Conversely, the Big Bang Theory about the beginning of the universe is an Origin Story, an Origin Myth, just like the first chapter of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. That doesn’t mean the theory is false. Nor does it mean there aren’t at least some good empirical reasons based in science for believing the story is true. Thus, a myth can be any real or fictional story, recurring theme, or character type (such as the Hero Myth) that appeals to the consciousness of people, or a group of people, by embodying enduring cultural ideals and values, and by giving expression to deep, commonly felt emotions or rational, inspiring, provocative ideas.

The idea that religious stories are inherently unscientific and stories created by people using scientific methods is a political correct, leftist idea that rings false. THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING contains other political false ideas. For example, in one scene, two elderly neighbors castigate Alithea for traveling all around the world studying other cultures. They tell her she should be defending her own British culture, which is under attack. The movie depicts these two women as hateful “bigots,” and takes a false leftist, politically correct multicultural approach, that all cultures are equal and no one culture is better than another culture.

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING also has multiple scenes depicting the use of occult magic. It also has strong sexual immorality and multiple scenes of total female nudity when it comes to the new sultan’s younger brother and his harem of obese naked women.

The combination of the movie’s negative, false Non-Christian worldview content and its depiction of lewd behavior and extreme nudity breach the line of being merely excessive to being abhorrent. The one saving grace of THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING, perhaps, is that it clearly shows that the Ottomon Empire, the biggest Islamic state that ever existed, was clearly a corrupt empire.