10 Movies That Abandoned Awesome Ideas Halfway Through
1. A Supernatural Romance Set Entirely In A Hotel Room - Three Thousand Years Of Longing
George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantastical romantic drama revolving around a professor, Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), who releases a Djinn (Idris Elba) from a bottle, and listens as he regales her with three tales of how he wound up in said bottle.
For about two-thirds of its runtime, Miller's film is a transfixing anthology of-sorts: a drama in which the two central characters chat in the confines of an Istanbul hotel room while Miller periodically cuts away to each of the Djinn's gorgeously realised stories.
It's a winning storytelling formula, that is until Miller decides to have Alithea and the Djinn exit the hotel room at the end of the second act.
The London-set remainder of the film ditches the anthology format and focuses instead on the not-quite-convincing-enough romance between the two leads, at which point dramatic interest quickly peters out into nothing.
If Miller had the conviction to set the entire drama in the hotel room and perhaps added another story or two into the anthology setup, this would've been so much better.