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George Miller’s newest movie based on a 1994 novel “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A. S. Byatt, follows an elder woman obsessed with stories and myths that finds a bottle with a genie inside, and now she needs to decide what she wishes for knowing that most stories with genies are either a cautionary tale or a tale where the genie tricks the protagonist.
Alithea (Tilda Swinton) is a researcher that looks at myths and tales from the past to understand what reason humans in the past gave for events that they didn’t have the knowledge of. After giving a speech, she and her historian friend go to a antique store where Alithea get lured to an white and blue bottle that was damaged, reaching her hotel she cleans the bottle and accidentally releases a genie named Djinn (Idris Elba) who tells her that when he grants her three wishes he may finally be free, but instead of asking for three wishes she decides to talk to Djinn and hear the story of his life that spends three thousand years.
This movie is very unique, it’s like sitting around a campfire and hearing stories of the narrator’s past, Djinn in this case. Alithea is a lonely person and seeing that Djinn and her are similar in their reclusive lives she takes a liking to him and the stories he tells, Djinn being part of these tales as they were being written in the past giver Alithea a new look into the past and helps her decide her future.
The movie has a great start and middle but the ending for this movie felt too long and overstays its welcome while the beginning shows us the characters and the middle has a ending goal with the stories it’s telling, the end doesn’t show a point that it wants to get to the message of the film that is given in the middle and it feels like the movie needed to hit a certain amount of hour so they put filler content in the end.
Even with a downer of an ending, the movie, especially the first two acts are beautiful, they have crazy visuals, amazing cinematography and camera work, an weird and sometimes emotional soundtrack. This movie is far from being bad, it’s great especially watching it on the big screen.
Rating: 77%
