3000 years of boredom

I really don't care at all for director George Miller's movies, but I do usually find Tilda Swinton extremely watchable.   Hence I decided to take a chance and watch their 2022 fantasy flop 3000 Years of Longing on Netflix.

I found it extremely dull, with problems that should have been obvious from the screenplay to any studio funding it.   I can't think of any other film with such long, long periods of purely narrated flashback story, without the characters on the screen in said scenes actually speaking.   And the fantasy versions of the past were just too silly, even for a movie about a genie from a bottle.

Overall, after the first 10 minutes (which do seem to show some promise), once another 20 or 30 minutes passed I found it impossible to avoid thinking "when is this film going to give us a hint as to where it's going."   It does, eventually, get to a relationship of sorts between the two characters, but there is no reason at all to feel invested in it; and once established (like the rest of the movie) it has a profound feeling of "going nowhere".  It is such a badly written film.  Nothing feels real about any of the characters, including Swinton's, or their reactions.   (And Miller co-wrote it, so he can bear all the blame.)

Yet it seems George Miller gets some sort of "benefit of the doubt" all the time from reviewers.  I can't help but feel it's something to do with the glasses and always seeming to give off  the (pretty typical for an Australian director) vibe of "I'm in the artist class, so if your politics are Left you must appreciate me".   Here, for example, Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave it 3 out of 5, but his description suggests it deserves a "fail" more than a "pass":

It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline. Swinton and Elba sit around in the hotel room while all the exotic drama is given to us in flashback-fragments of wonder. There is something very old-fashioned about it, and I think a younger film-maker might have wanted to engage more knowingly with ideas of orientalism, race and gender. Yet for all that it is a little bit underpowered, with not much of a screen-relationship between Elba and Swinton.

Of course, I have to admit that some people seemed to like it, if online reviews are anything to go by.  I can't fathom why, but I guess its commercial failure gives me some encouragement that my view is the more widely shared.