This film caps a strange, extended era for Miller where he produced and directed nothing but children’s fare. In 1992, he released the medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil, and then for more than twenty years every release bearing his name was aimed at kids. Two duologies in total: Babe (1995; producer and writer only), Babe: Pig in the City (1998), Happy Feet (2006), and now this. (Frustratingly, it is not Happy Feet 2, but Happy Feet Two. I get annoyed every time I type it.) The one exception was his hourlong 1997 documentary about Australian cinema, 40,000 Years of Dreaming, amusingly subtitled White Fellas Dreamin. Never seen it, but that’s a heck of a name.

After Happy Feet Two, Miller’s next release would finally be the one he’d been working on behind the scenes for decades: a fourth entry in his unpredictable action series Mad Max. It is safe to say that is a film of more consequence, influence, and artistic achievement than Happy Feet Two, and one I’m looking forward to writing about. But the gap between an Antarctic jukebox musical and chrome-sprayed war rigs is not as wide as it looks.

The connections to the rest of Miller’s career aren’t just biographical trivia; they make one of the most interesting components of Happy Feet Two. Like many Miller films, this one feels like a rehearsal space for techniques he’ll refine and redeploy later. Most obvious is his growing mastery of space and pace during set pieces. The action here is huge, literally glacier-sized and featuring a cast of hundreds at times, and busy with overlapping goals, yet Miller keeps our eyes gliding from beat to beat without losing momentum. It sounds silly given how different the movies are in tone and audience, but you can see Miller becoming the filmmaker who would make Mad Max: Fury Road right here, stomping around with tap-dancing penguins.

The film follows Erik (Ava Acres), the non-dancing son of Mumble (Elijah Wood) and Gloria (Alecia Moore; i.e. P!nk, replacing Brittany Murphy, RIP) from Happy Feet the first. Erik bolts from Emperor-Land with friends Bo (Meibh Campbell) and Atticus (Benjamin Flores Jr.) and latches onto the charisma of the Mighty Sven (Hank Azaria), a self-styled flying penguin, whom most viewers will immediately recognize as actually a puffin. Sven pals around with ex-guru Lovelace (Robin Williams in one of his last performances). Back home, a wandering iceberg sideswipes the colony into a vast icy cul-de-sac, forcing Mumble and Erik to shuttle fish for survival, recruit the aid of Bryan the Beach Master (Richard Carter), an elephant seal, and hold the community together while they wait and search for a miracle.

You might recognize parts of this as a mirror image of the first Happy Feet. For example, the protagonist: Last time, dancing was deviant and one little hoofer had to argue for self-expression; now the culture has pivoted and the one kid who won’t dance feels out of step. On paper, that’s a cute inversion ripe with metaphor. In practice, it mostly plays like second verse, same as the first: a child doesn’t fit in, runs away, meets an offbeat mentor, and returns with new conviction. I know it’s not fair competition, but I compare that to Toy Story 2, which also mirrors its original, but makes it meaningful by expanding its world and complicating its ideas. Happy Feet Two doesn’t get that far; this sequel flips and remixes the premise but rarely deepens it.

The story contains a theme that Miller has tugged at throughout his filmography, especially in his family films: the danger and power of persuasive voices in altering the sentiment and behavior of the masses. Azaria’s Sven is inspiration and charlatan in equal measure, selling simple overconfidence as the answer to complex problems without being sure whether he believes in the mojo himself. Lovelace, Mumble, and Noah the Elder (Hugo Weaving) all comment on topics of authority and conformity across the two Happy Feetses. The movie keeps staging mini-referendums on who gets to lead and why: the glittering appeal of transformative paradigm shifts versus the unglamorous grind of communal labor in well-known patterns; why the former can be illusory and the latter can be oppressive, and thus a balance of both is needed. Even the mass dances offer a story in motion that you might even call kinetic political language — choreography as expression of consensus and solidarity that shakes the world; literally, in the case of Happy Feet Two.

Musically, this a glossier, more engineered spin on the first film’s mix-tape exuberance. John Powell’s score still does the heavy lifting, pulsing beneath medleys that stitch together pop standards (an “Under Pressure”/“Rhythm Nation” mash is fun), with some original anthems like “Bridge of Light”, carried by P!nk’s strong vocals. “Tightrope,” a cover of the Janelle Monae banger, is a highlight. Powell’s work here, though more arrangement than composition, is a preview for his underappreciated collection of number for The Lorax a year later. (“Thneedville” obliterates everything here.)

I’ve yet to mention the strangest and most fascinating thread in the movie: the krill. Will (Brad Pitt) and Bill (Matt Damon) appear as microscopic organisms experiencing an entirely parallel underwater adventure to the penguins, confronting their own perception of the world, which sometimes mirrors the penguins’ challenges and sometimes becomes more existential. Will and Bill peel away from their swarm to see if there’s more to life than floating with the masses and getting eaten, and tumble into a seafaring two-hander about evolution, purpose, and friendship that could almost be its own short film.

It’s a wacky, provocative subplot for a half-dozen reasons. Two of the biggest movie stars on the planet voice the tiniest creatures in the sea. Their actions have no bearing on the main plot, which adds a dark undercurrent to their pondering. For the purposes of the penguins we’ve followed since the start of last movie, their entire existence is meaningless. In a penguin duology filled with bizarre images, metaphors, and tone shifts, it’s the only one I’ve actually taken away from the series: the daunting crush of being a krill battling a glacier, where nothing you do matters, and yet you still must find meaning for the struggle. Pitt and Damon’s banter cuts darker and deeper than most anything you find in other kids’ films (glory year Pixar exempted, of course). If I had to guess, I bet it reflects Miller’s own self-doubts and unease about his place in Hollywood and the world at large, a tension always just barely below the surface of his films. The krill’s quest is the most memorable, and honestly best, story thread in Happy Feet Two, precisely because it’s so untethered to everything else going on.

Although Happy Feet Two is more polished in its animation and more refined in its virtual camera moves and set-piece design, it lacks the surreal sprawl of the original and the mixed-media texture of Happy Feet’s second half. The strange confluence of ideas — part tired retread of dancing penguin shenanigans, part goofy swerve of krill existentialism — doesn’t add up to much of a total product, despite Miller’s attempts to Frankenstein it together. It’s a fun movie to talk about and strange in a vacuum, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

And yet Happy Feet Two goes down smooth enough. It never feels broken or wasteful, just unnecessary. What it does feel like, perhaps, is necessary warm-up for Miller before making his grand opus. Fury Road would trade animation for hyper-real stunt work, glaciers for desert roads, but carry over the best parts of the digital polish and oomph on display here, expanding “move the crowd with motion” into a two-hour symphony of velocity and action cause-and-effect. On the flip side, I don’t recall that one having any krill pondering their place in the universe.

Happy Feet is a curio even within the pond of 2000s animation. It’s part jukebox musical, part hero’s journey, part ecological fable, and all visionary technical exercise. The tone swings between music video exuberance through operatic drama, stitched together by a visual sensibility that’s both digitally pristine and expressive. Though it’s Miller’s first animated feature, it doesn’t feel like a freshman effort; rather, it extends the visual experimentation of his live-action work.

In that sense, Happy Feet is a natural outgrowth of the two Babe films, the first of which Miller just produced, the second of which he directed. Like those films, it channels takes a family-oriented fairy tale and applies some cutting-edge visual technology to bring it to life. But Happy Feet turns up the volume: it’s weirder, bigger, and more ambitious than the Babes. Miller adopts some conventions of the CGI comedy — quipping, caricatured, celebrity-voiced animals especially — without ever settling into the formula.

The film is set in the Antarctic emperor penguin society during their mating cycle. Each bird attracts a mate by singing a unique “heartsong,” a melody that expresses the core of who they are, and a romanticizing of the real-life trait of penguins identifying partners by their distinct vocalization. Mumble (Elijah Wood), a penguin chick who barely survived his hatching, has a glitch — he can’t sing to save his life. But when his oversized feet start tapping, he discovers a new form of self-expression, one that the penguin elders regard with suspicion and scorn.

The early stretch of the film charts Mumble’s birth and growth as an outsider. His parents, Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) — inspired by ‘50s icons Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, respectively — meet and fall in love to an opening medley. When he hatches, Mumble’s dancing earns ridicule from his peers and disappointment from his father while his mom is off hunting fish. Mumble eventually finds kinship in the Amigos, a group of rambunctious Adélie penguins (stylized and vocalized as an ethnic gang of greasers) who welcome his eccentricities. They include Ramon, memorably voiced by Robin Williams doing a silly voice. (Though nowhere close to the level of Robin Williams hurricane of ham in, e.g. Aladdin.)

From a narrative and texture perspective, Happy Feet’s first act very much resembles the post-Shrek DreamWorks Animation playbook: quirky protagonist, pop soundtrack, sassy supporting cast, some light moralizing, anachronistic jokes, and a message about individuality wrapped around its misunderstood outsiders. But even in these more conventional opening minutes, Happy Feet has an idiosyncratic flavor. First is the wildly ambitious camera movement and photorealism; it’s not at the level that Pixar was at in the mid-to-late-aughts, but it’s better than most others of the era trying CGI features, and it’s certainly the most ambitious in rendering natural environments of its generation. Miller emphasizes realistic animal movement, particularly in how the penguins waddle and emote, set against harrowing icy vistas. Instead of flattening the world into cartoon abstraction, Miller makes it feel big and cold and even menacing.

One of the movie’s weirdest contradictions is how totally unsuited penguins are to dance. They are bowling pins with beaks. It genuinely makes me wonder if Miller pursued the film’s pitch with irony — singing and dancing animal musical, but it’s with realistic animals that it’s impossible to imagine tap dancing. Seeing emperor penguins groove just never looks quite right, and I genuinely can’t decide if I like that about Happy Feet. Their inherent awkwardness adds comedy and uncanniness to Mumble’s gift. That tension between groundbreaking animation and childlike storytelling is part of Miller’s vision, I think.

(Edit: I’ve been called out on the above point on The Goods’ Discord. Penguins tap-dancing is a long-standing cultural image that Miller is playing on, dating at least to Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Mary Poppins, and probably further. I still think it looks goofy and unnatural.)

Despite the anatomical absurdity, the dance sequences work surprisingly well from a staging perspective. That’s largely thanks to Miller’s direction and the performance capture acting of Savion Glover, who is mapped onto Mumble’s flippers and feet. The musical numbers are kinetic and joyful to watch, with the camera gliding and spinning with fluidity. Miller brings the same action sensibility to a group tap-dance as he does to a car chase in Mad Max.

But let’s not dwell on the opening too much, because after the first act, the movie takes a turn. Mumble’s personal journey gives way to an epic parable about ecological collapse — Miller explores the crumbling of the Antarctic ecosystem and psychological effect it has on the animal societies. He ties it directly to human activities. The tonal shift is bold and a bit unhinged in its swerves like Pig in the City and The Witches of Eastwick. What begins as a lightweight musical becomes weirdly austere, even didactic. Finding Nemo is one obvious inspiration, particularly as Mumble goes through an odyssey encountering a variety of sea and ice dangers — memorably, a chase with a leopard seal — including a face-to-face encounter with humans. But it’s more severe than in the equally-dangerous Nemo; there’s no sense of delightful misadventure in Mumble’s reckoning with danger.

By the third act turn, the movie drops nearly all dialogue and plunges Mumble into a quest against pollution and overfishing. It includes an eerie, near-silent aquarium sequence that is deeply unsettling, bordering on horror-tinged. We witness Mumble completely entrapped in glass, his movements desperate and alien to the probing gawkers. Mumble looks back on his past with retrospection bordering on hallucination.

I’m not entirely convinced this later stretch works as character-based narrative escalation — the story’s emotional throughline of “be yourself” is diluted by the environmentalism parable. But as a swing-for-the-fences story with stark visuals (blending in some real-life humans into the CGI) and a climactic payoff on the growing sense of dread throughout the film, the final act is gutsy, and it remains bracing two decades later.

The audacity of Happy Feet is backed by a titanic production effort. To pull off the film’s complex choreography and detailed environments, Miller and his team at Animal Logic invested heavily into improving the studio’s animation tech and innovative motion capture tools. They mapped human dancers onto animals — star Glover even attended “penguin school” to master the species’ waddling gait. An IBM-built server farm crunched millions of rendering hours for environmental and effect animation to compete with the polish of established studios. Even though the aims of photorealism in the character designs lend the visuals an odd, uncanny flavor, it undoubtedly looks like Miller wanted it to, extremely impressive given the context.

The film’s genesis came from a throwaway comment during the making of Mad Max 2, when a cameraman suggested Miller film something in Antarctica as a counterpoint to the hot, dry landscapes of Australia. That notion stuck in the director’s brain, and when production on the fourth Mad Max movie stalled, Miller and producer Doug Mitchell fast-tracked Happy Feet instead.

In hindsight, Miller’s pause on Mad Max: Fury Road and pivot into penguins looks like an ingenious detour. Throughout Happy Feet, Miller built crucial skills — spatially fluid action, CGI choreography, orchestrating huge crowds in digitally crafted settings — that he would use to reinvent R-rated action cinema a decade later. The Mad Maxes and the Happy Feetses are both obsessed with physical movement, operate in vast, hostile environments, and feature societies grappling with tradition and survival. It’s no exaggeration to say Fury Road might not exist in its ultimate form without Happy Feet (and its even stranger sequel).

In the broader cultural memory, Happy Feet often gets lumped in with the mid-2000s penguin wave: March of the Penguins, Surf’s Up, Madagascar, the Pingu revival, Club Penguin, etc. The Pokemon games that launched in that era, Diamond and Pearl, had a penguin-themed evolution line as its water starters (Piplup-Prinplup-Empoleon). For whatever reason, our Antarctic friends became inescapable for a few years. (I suspect rising awareness of melting ice caps and climate change, key focuses for both Happy Feet and March of the Penguins, is related.)

Miller’s strange swerve into animation paid off, at least financially: the film was a major hit, grossing nearly four times its budget and walking away with the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — still the only Oscar that Miller’s personally pocketed. It also stands as a flex: proof the visionary can do it all; a bold visual experiment of mocap, environmental effect rendering, and digital camera movement disguised as family entertainment, a stealth auteur work rather than a cheap mainstream sellout you might fear when you learn the Mad Max guy got a budget and made a CGI family comedy.

Happy Feet is less than the sum of its parts, I fear, but those parts are indeed so varied and bold. It’s tonally inconsistent and structurally unusual. It is never lacking in flavor or ambition or ideas. It was also not the end of the Happy Feet saga: With Happy Feet Two five years later, Miller would double down on the bizarre tension of tones and stakes, resulting in an even stranger and more uneven follow-up. Luckily, Happy Feet has enough moves to keep me curious for more.

What do I mean? Well, remember the warm storybook mise en scene and narrative logic that made Babe so inviting? Here are a few plot events in Pig in the City: Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) suffers a near-death spinal-mutilating fall because of Babe’s cluelessness; Hoggett’s wife Esme (Magda Szubanski) flies in desperation to the big city Metropolis to financially exploit Babe’s fame or else lose the farm to creditors; a drug-sniffing dog that Babe befriends turns him and Esme in as traffickers for no reason except that he’s bored and gets treats when he identifies a culprit. This all happens in the film’s first ten minutes. The cruel punches do not stop rolling in for the rest of the runtime. I concluded my review of Babe with a backhanded compliment towards its “uncontroversial kindness” — no one would ever use that phrase for its sequel.

It’s all a bit mean-spirited, and yet Babe: Pig in the City is also miraculously good. Almost all of its success comes down to the prodigious skill and creativity of George Miller. Unlike Babe, Miller is the credited director; no need to retroactively tussle for credit, though I’m not sure there’d be so much desperation to have this film serve as your legacy as there was the original. Miller, in his final live-action film until Mad Max: Fury Road seventeen years later, displays his unconventional worldbuilding and visionary set piece construction. (As scattershot as his career is, a zoomed-out view does paint a picture of a singular director gradually expanding and refining his one-of-a-kind creative toolset in a steady arc, even as each film itself is idiosyncratic.) And, like nearly all of Miller’s films, Babe: Pig in the City revels in its excesses and strange curves.

The animal “movie magic” of the original Babe — a blend of animatronics and real animals seamlessly interacting with the human world around it — is even more impressive than before. I still have no earthly idea how Miller pulled it all off: The variety of animals, the sheer numbers of them onscreen, and the complexity of their actions has grown dramatically between films. The blocking and stunt choreography and scene construction on display would be a marvel even if these characters were humans or CGI constructions; that they are real-life dogs and monkeys and pigs borders on the impossible.

Even beyond that, Pig in the City is an enormous triumph as a production. The sets are tinged with expressionism but all part of an enveloping whole. The costumes are fun. A rescue in a river is genuinely harrowing. There are a few effects that pop off the screen in visceral tactility, like a goopy substance that entraps Esme. Some of Miller’s direction is outstanding; watching the action, I even detected a few whiffs of the kinetic glory he’d achieve with Fury Road down the line (something he would build up to in the Happy Feet movies, as well).

Babe: Pig in the City’s story is episodic. The original Babe’s was, too, but these episodes are much more diverse and diffuse than before. Babe (now voiced by E.G. Daily) gets roped into a performing clown act. A butcher abducts him. He faces down animal control, who wants to cage him for the rest of his days. Abused and neglected animals turn to him for salvation. Every turn is bleak. But there is some strength in this: Witnessing Babe’s generous character persist through misery makes his kindness more touching than it ever was in the original.

There is a major wrinkle in my reading of the film that makes me much more receptive to it: I see this story as George Miller reflecting on his own filmmaking career. Babe is Miller. Both are Aussie countryside heroes who made their own unconventional paths. Both packed their bags for glory and riches in the big city, Metropolis/Hollywood. Both find not an easy road to fame and fulfillment, but a cruel and chaotic system with no patience or benevolence. Neither ever fully fits in, and both stick out like sore thumbs. Babe and Miller are paraded around and exploited, his own ambitions and achievements degraded. Yet each perseveres and wins people over by bringing their hometown countryside magic to Metropolis/Hollywood. Or, more precisely, they take some of that big city razzle-dazzle to their native place. With this film’s ending, Miller declares: He will work on his terms, not theirs.

It’s more complicated than that, though. While the way that Miller paints both his protagonist and his own life story as ultimately noble and valuable, there is quite a bit of self-mockery in this portrait. As a sequel, the film parodies the original and, as a result, Miller self-deprecates. He takes a sledgehammer to the heartwarming magic of the original — “baa ram ewe” gets laughed at and ignored, “that’ll do, pig” is self-consciously and artificially bolted on at the end. He references his other films a couple of times, like when Babe gets a Road Warrior extra-esque spike collar, or a late balloon-filled sequence that visually quotes The Witches of Eastwick. That Babe cannot fit in Metropolis is as much Babe’s own fault as it is the fault of the denizens and institutions of the city. How dare Babe take himself so seriously? Why would he think a humble pig with so minor a talent as shepherding would have any worth in the busy lives of everyday people with bigger problems in their lives? Just who does Babe, a false messiah for much of the story, think he is; and just what does Miller think he’s doing with his self-seriousness?

Babe: Pig in the City was divisive upon its release, and it remains so. Siskel and Ebert both adored it: Ebert gave it four stars and Siskel called it the best film of 1998 — you know, the year that also gave us The Thin Red Line and The Truman Show and Saving Private Ryan and bunch of other stone cold classics. But plenty of critics panned it, and it has a negative audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It ranks well below median in most rankings and fan appraisals of the director’s filmography. I’d personally place it in the upper half of his work, though only by a bit.

Babe: Pig in the City is a film that’s more fascinating than it is great, but it is certainly the latter, too. Afterwards, Miller would stick with family movies as his various other projects churned through production hell. It would take almost a decade before Happy Feet came out, with Happy Feet 2 a few years on its tail. But Miller’s very best was indeed yet to come.

Take away everything that’s happened in the 30 years since. Put yourself in the mindset of a George Miller fan in 1995 and ask yourself: Is this a Miller film? The obvious counterfactual reaction is: Of course it isn’t! He’s the Mad Max guy! Ozploitation and car chases and freaky dystopias! Even his non-Mad Max films, The Witches of Eastwick and Lorenzo’s Oil, are aimed at grown-ups (one a dark comedy, the other a heavy drama). And yet, I think it is very plausibly something touched with Miller’s inspiration: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome’s second half was an Amblin-style adventure co-starring feral children. Miller is obviously fascinated by the tone of childlike whimsy; even his epic Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior has a cartoonish heart. More broadly, Miller demonstrated through the early ‘90s a remarkable elasticity, always trying something in a new storytelling space with each one of his directorial efforts. A “living storybook” like Babe is a plausible next step for the director. (Miller would also spend the next 20 years making kids’ movies, so the entire thought exercise wondering whether he’d make a family-friendly film is a bit facile.)

Two traits in particular make Babe feel like a Miller picture. The first is the setting: the film was shot largely in Australia. Unless I’m mistaken, Babe’s national setting is never explicitly stated; it reads as a nonspecific blend of English, American, and Australian. The novel it’s based off of takes place in England, and Babe radiates with the A.A. Milne-esque coziness of Edwardian England (tinted with ‘50s kitsch); the animals and imagery are a blend of American farmland and Australian shepherding.

The second Miller hallmark is just how fully formed and overflowing with creativity the film’s vision and worldbuilding are. Like all of Miller’s early films, the sheer imagination and vivid texture are a tidal wave: Memorable sets, amusing production flourishes, distinct characters, and flavorful argot color every minute of screentime.

But that brings me to the qualities of Babe that are distinctly non-Millerish: Babe is terrifically focused, even restrained. Those are two words you’d never use to describe a Miller picture. (Sure enough, the Miller-directed Babe sequel flies loose in a way Babe doesn’t.) And so my conclusion is that Babe is really the best of both worlds: The wild inventiveness of Miller reined in and shaped by Noonan. I would feel a little more confident in this claim if I had seen any more of Noonan’s work, and if any of it had anywhere near the reputation of Babe, but alas — he’s made only one other feature film, a 2006 biopic of children’s author Beatrix Potter.

Babe tells the story of a young pig saved from slaughter and won at a local fair by a farmer named Arthur Haggett (James Cromwell). Babe (Christine Cavanaugh) joins Haggett’s farm as a clueless interloper on the animal social order, inadvertently disrupting the calm. The farm is a pastoral portrait that has a lot of Charlotte’s Web in its DNA, plus just a smidge of Animal Farm. Babe is taken in by the Haggett’s Border Collies, though the dad, Rex (Hugo Weaving) is very speciesist and harsh, like Kerchak in Disney’s Tarzan.

Babe bumbles through some misadventures, mainly centered around a feisty duck named Ferdinand (Danny Mann), before he starts inhabiting sheepdog tendencies from his Border Collie adoptive family. The quiet Haggett sees a spark of something special in Babe; the pig finds that he can influence the sheep by being empathetic to them in a way a barking dog could never be. It culminates in a sheepdog competition in which Haggett submits Babe as a competitor, prompting Air Bud-style consternation over whether the rulebook permits a sheep-pig competitor. This is a children’s movie, so you can probably guess whether Babe wins the trophy despite his unconventional stature. (And the film’s famous closing line is “that’ll do, pig” in case you need another hint.)

The sturdy yet episodic narrative is not what makes Babe so special, but the execution therein. There’s a magic to Babe, a glowing, bespoke warmth that has been frequently and accurately described as a children’s picture book come to life. In fact, the film adopts a framing display of a book cover and turning page chapter titles. The production has a slight diorama quality to it, but richly detailed and lived-in, occasionally even expressionistic (like at the pig farm during the opening segment). Singing barn mice serve as a Greek rodent chorus transitioning us between chapters. The colors are bright and vibrant, especially the rolling green pastures.

Most importantly, the animals themselves are marvels of movie magic. I remain genuinely astonished how Noonan and co. achieved such expressive and lifelike creatures. The voice-synced mouths are almost entirely seamless, with well-disguised animatronics reportedly the mechanism. To my eyes, it’s just as believable to me that Miller and Noonan found real life talking animals; they’re that good, especially in comparison to the shitty CGI that pervades most 21st century family features.

The cast is excellent, too. The voice acting is good all around, and the humans leave a real impression. Two highlights are Cromwell, stoic and strong but almost completely taciturn, and Magda Szubanski as his gossiping wife. Cromwell lends a nobility to the material that serves as a backbone in contrast to the heightened animal shenanigans, and Szubanski offers some of that signature Australian humor, motor-mouthed and slightly mean.

I frankly have no complaints of note about Babe. At 91 minutes, I can’t even gripe about the runtime! I could probably nitpick a few narrative choices and thematic inconsistencies, but they’re so minor and washed away by the film’s flowing charm that they’re not worth the digital ink. Babe is essentially flawless. That’s not the same as saying it’s a “Masterpiece” — whether it’s overfamiliarity or something about its tone and uncontroversial kindness, I just don’t adore it the way I do plenty of other, more flawed films. Maybe that makes me spiteful, holding back that last rating point. Regardless of my hesitation at dropping the M-word, this is one of the great live action children’s films of the past several decades, a contender for Miller’s best movie, and a genuine achievement in filmmaking. Babe is a wonderful film.

It’s a grueling film: 135 minutes long and putting its character through the gauntlet. And yet there’s a spark that prevents it from devolving to misery. The opening half hour in particular is divinely great and strange before the film pivots to slightly more straightforward, though still engaging, storytelling mode.

Lorenzo’s Oil follows the quest of Augusto (Nick Nolte) and Michaela (Susan Sarandon) Odone to find a cure for their son Lorenzo’s (Zack Greenberg) rare, brain-rotting disease. The couple reject medical consensus in their own intellectual and spiritual journey, doing their own research and experimentation to try and find the missing piece in the cure for Lorenzo’s condition. Meanwhile, they try to maintain hope and sanity as Lorenzo’s condition worsens to a horrifying, vegetative state.

Nolte and Sarandon are the film’s anchors, and both are terrific. Sarandon is more squarely in awards-bait territory as a devastated mom, commanding the screen with each new stroke of bad luck. It’s an excellent performance. She’s never shrill, genuinely moving. Nolte, by contrast, goes to an otherworldly place with a totally unconventional turn: He adopts a thick Italian accent and acts as if he’s a Michaelangelo sculpture come to life. He carries himself with hulking, operatic physicality, his face carved with tragedy. He repeatedly has old, fancy glasses dangling from the tip of his nose or off his face like crystal teardrops. It’s a wacky and brilliant role for the great Nolte.

Critic Mike D’Angelo is among several writers who have equated the film to “torture porn” in the physical degradation that Lorenzo goes through. Perhaps. But I find Miller’s take on the ailing child to be surprising and almost… I feel gross saying it… thrilling: He frames Lorenzo as a Gothic horror creature, wailing and flailing, a fresh wave of brutal monstrosity emerging with each scene. I would go so far as to say Miller is having some baroque fun with turning a disease-ridden child into a repellent object of terror.

Miller shoots the film almost entirely in close-up, giving every moment an arch emotionality. Especially profound are some over-the-top segments early in the film when the Odone family learn about the terminal diagnosis and come to grips with it: In one great montage, Nolte finds himself howling as his agonized figure is double exposed with terrifying words likes “quadriplegic” from a medical journal. Another brilliant sequence occurs during a church service: A remarkable top-down shot shows Sarandon pleading directly to the heavens for mercy.

The film’s second half has a much more typical cadence to it, and the result is a film that overstays its welcome a bit. There’s an especially odd rhythm to the very end of the film, as the story concludes on a memorable, bittersweet note… only for the film to more-or-less exactly repeat itself, dampening the conclusive impact and dragging out the last breaths.

But I think the movie gains more than it loses from its familiar structure and beats. Miller is an instinctual, unconventional filmmaker at heart. In something free-form like The Witches of Eastwick, we get a film that follows his every whim and ends up as a shapeless and indulgent overall product. The structure inherent in Lorenzo’s Oil’s narrative, even if it’s just a retelling of a true-life event as a mainstream drama, constantly points Miller in the right direction. He can never go too far afield in a story with such a clear arc. My first guess was that he had adapted somebody else’s screenplay, but that’s not true: Miller is one of the film’s writers, along with fellow Australian Nick Enright. I guess his overarching storytelling instincts are developing.

Post-COVID, some of Lorenzo’s Oil plays differently. It leaves an odd aftertaste some might found off-putting. In short, Augusto and Michaela’s activism against the advice and wisdom of scientists and doctors is extremely evocative of anti-vax conspiracy thinking. It fits well enough I could see the movie being used as propaganda by the anti-vax movement, honestly. Miller doesn’t help matters by playing up the heroic aspects of the rebellion against medicine and downplaying the story’s mixed legacy; the truth is that the titular oil is no miracle cure in real life.

But it ultimately is not really a mark against the film in my eyes. The Odones’ battle against the establishment is not conspiratorial; it’s the quest of a plucky underdog. They admire and work with doctors, just wish the institutions would act a little bit more urgently and with more compassion. Their discoveries are not hare-brained theories that outright reject modern medicine, but clever and reasearch-based in ways that are ultimately backed and prescribed by doctors. I’m sure many anti-vaxxers would describe their vaccine skepticism and alternative treatments in similar terms, of course. But the anti-big pharma theme is ultimately no more than a strange undercurrent to Lorenzo’s Oil.

It’s quite exciting to see George Miller’s prodigious creativity and directorial vision targeted towards a different kind of material than the gritty genre films that he cut his teeth on. Through five feature films, it’s clear he has the touch and the vision to synthesize strange ideas and push boundaries. Across his early filmography, the success or failure of the final product is less about whether he has the mojo (he certainly does) but more about how successful he is in shaping it and channeling it into something cohesive. His stronger stories — this, Mad Max 2 — hold together into stories with propulsion and shape. He’d continue his genre expansion into children’s fables with Babe, a film he would produce and co-write but not direct, which was a choice he’d regret and spend a lot of energy trying to make up for in the following years.

It is George Miller’s fourth feature-length film and his first non-Mad Max outing, and it both breaks new ground from his road action series and overlaps with them. It is, of course, totally different in genre and surface layer and setting. But I could really feel that it shared a creator with the Mad Maxes. Like those movies, The Witches of Eastwick brings freewheeling, low-exposition sense of worldbuilding and character development. It also offers an almost whimsical lack of coherency that matches his off-the-walls dystopian action trilogy.

The story takes place in a cozy New England town named Eastwick, where three single and sexually frustrated women are friends. They are the sculptor Alex (Cher), the music teacher Jane (Susan Sarandon), and the newspaper columnist Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer). They have various romantic and childbearing histories, and all are the subject of local gossip. Married men around town, all losers, can’t keep their wandering eyes (and occasionally their wandering hands) off of them, so the trio are widely scorned by the jealous Eastwick wives.

The three bond over wine and junk food every Thursday night, complaining mostly about men. (Despite having three women leads and no romantic interest characters until the end of the first act, I do not think The Witches of Eastwick passes the Bechdel test.) Then, something strange happens to them: They begin unwittingly influencing the world through witch magic they accidentally cast together. Their weekly hangouts become an unintentional coven gathering. It starts with low-stakes witchery, like when they cause a rainstorm when a boorish principal is making a speech and they get bored. And then, one night, they do something much more dangerous: Without realizing it, they conjure “the ideal man” with a list of drunken wishes of how he’d behave and how big his penis would be. One problem: They forgot to specify that he shouldn’t be The Devil.

Sure enough, Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson) moves into town shortly thereafter, occupying a creepy old mansion on a hill. Like Voldemort, people around town have trouble even saying his name. Before long, he crosses paths with each of Alex, Jane, and Sukie — first seducing each individually, then cavorting with them as a collective. The polycule arrangement goes swimmingly at first, until it doesn’t, and Van Horne engages in voodoo warfare with the witches for the film’s closing act.

There really are a lot of places Miller could have injected the story with some satiric content, and maybe if you squint you’ll find something, but I didn’t. Some of the potential hooks include: the sexual mores of an American small town; the hypocrisy and cruelty of the gossip circle; the dual-edged sword of sexual liberation and promiscuity; the danger and power of female sexuality in a puritanical culture; the ways men manipulate women and vice versa; etc. All of that stuff is right there, practically on the surface, and Miller has absolutely no time for any of it. For him, The Witches of Eastwick is an impish game. Get that social commentary out of here. He gets his jollies with more visceral fun. In George Miller’s mind, it is both the means AND the ends of this film when, e.g., Veronica Cartwright shouts “dildo!” at the top of her lungs in the middle of a crowded church, then projectile vomits red goo all over the priest. It’s a shocking, entertaining, imaginitive moment with absolutely nothing to say.

Between this and The Bonfire of the Vanities, I’m convinced that I could write a more incisive and well-structured screenplay than screenwriter Michael Cristofer, who gets the credit for loosely adapting a John Updike novel. (And I haven’t fired up my copy of Final Draft in about 12 years.) This sloppy script is a half-baked pile of incompatible scenes and ideas. Whether Miller himself did a pass on the script, I’m not sure; it certainly feels like his work in cadence and Australian-style banter.

It is tempting to call The Witches of Eastwick a “live-action cartoon,” but this would not be quite right. It would suggest an orchestrated frenzy of energy. But the entire structure of this film is aimless. It’s not the steady, escalating anarchy of fellow ‘80s movies The ‘Burbs or Return of the Living Dead. Nor is it subversive; it’s too apathetic to be a screaming bit of punk rock like Repo Man, despite what you might expect from a visionary weirdo cultural outsider like Miller. It is, instead, a messy victim of slapdash structure and tonal flow. In this regard, it matches the original Mad Max, but for that one, Miller’s debut, I at least found some synergy in the spit-and-bubble gum production with the scruffy story and frequent tonal fluctuations.

Where The Witches of Eastwick shines, and nearly gets to a recommendation, is on the strength of a few individual sequences. There’s an absolutely wonderful fancy party scene inexplicably scored to “Nessun Dorma” and featuring ten thousand pink balloons, shimmering like soap bubbles. A montage shows the cast dancing around on serving carts and hanging from chandeliers. There’s also an all-time Cher monologue in response to Jack Nicholson flexing on king-size bed muttering about “pussy after lunch.” One of the last and best scenes in the film has Nicholson delivering some of his funniest and grossest physical comedy of his entire career as he rants and raves about God creating women to a silent, baffled church crowd.

The cast, too, is something special: You couldn’t come up with a better fit for a deranged, animalistic sex demon than late-’80s Jack Nicholson, especially when he’s got that grody little ponytail. He chews through all the material that is designed specifically to be chewed through. Sarandon, Cher, and Pfeiffer are all special in their own ways: Sarandon’s hair is a ‘do for the history books, Cher stakes yet another “underrated” and “undercast” claim with a funny turn full of presence, and Pfeiffer reminds us why she was synonymous with “sexy” around the turn of 1990. They form a wondrously beautiful and engaging trio that could have benefited from sharper drawn portraits rather than the same-ish characters the screenplay gives them. With only a few exceptions, you could replace the dialogue of one of Alex, Jane, and Sukie with another in any given scene and it would work just as well. That’s a bad sign.

What it boils down to is that I don’t know how or why I would try to convince someone to watch this movie. It’s not quite funny enough to be a comedy. It’s got moments, but it’s not unhinged or chaotic enough to be paired with other ‘80s slices of batshit anarchy. If it had more of a feminist bent, it might stand out as a work of goofy gender upheaval, but it really can’t decide whether it even likes its women, nor does it give them nearly enough to do. I feel a little disingenuous rating it lower than Mad Max; it’s probably a better movie overall, and certainly one I’d be more excited to rewatch than Miller’s dingy debut. But I just can’t give it a passing it grade. From the outside, it should be great, but the deflating sense of wasted potential and aimlessness weigh it down.

But these films are barely even the same genre, let alone the same continuous narrative. If their worldbuilding style is consistently haphazard in spirit, each world itself is completely distinct. The tone of each film is such a sharp left turn from the previous that either Miller has an inherent creative aversion to repeating himself, or else he aggressively forced himself to avoid any type of sequelitis from picture to picture. Had a fourth movie in the series had come out in the ‘80s, it could just as well have been a musical, or a romantic melodrama, or a space opera, or a slasher. Nothing would have surprised me.

Whereas the original Mad Max is a quirky microbudget Ozploitation number set near present day in semi-rural Australia, and Mad Max 2 is a dusty, dystopian hero’s quest, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is stranger than either. In fact, it’s basically two separate, strange films in one: The first half is a grimy gladiator picture; the second half is a wilderness survival story co-starring knockoff Lost Boys; and the climax is a heist chase that mashes them together. Miller continues to pull weird strands of subgenres into his stories as if it’s the most intuitive narrative mashup in the world.

The first half of this film is as good or better than the climax of Mad Max 2 (high praise), but in different ways: The series’ mucky worldbuilding reaches an apex (or, technically, a trench). It sounds strange on paper, but it’s somehow even more bizarre and flavorful in action than in text: Max (Gibson) enters the fallout shelter-esque civilization called Bartertown, led by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner; yep!) in search of his stolen vehicle. As you’d guess from its name, Bartertown requires you bring goods or services to exchange for its economy. Max proffers his badassery as his commodity.

Aunty Entity, impressed, shows Max how Bartertown operates: its electricity comes from methane generated in an underground animal farm run by “Master Blaster,” a two-part team consisting of a shrunken genius, Master (Angelo Rossitto) and his dimwitted hulking assistant, Blaster (Paul Larsson). We learn from Aunty Entity that Master has become too powerful in the Bartertown hierarchy, and she recruits Max to kill Blaster so that the frail Master can be more easily manipulated… or something like that. It’s not an entirely coherent setup, though it’s deeply fun to watch, as it features some phenomenal production and set design. As much as Mad Max 2 offered a quintessential, hugely influential vision of one post-apocalyptic setting — the desolate, retro-indutrial, lawless ruins — Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome does the same in a totally different post-apocalyptic setting — the underground, insulated, hyper-regimented, nightmare society. It’s a real achievement of imagination and design. The climax of this first act is absolutely terrific: a cage fight and escape sequence that shows Miller’s take on hand-to-hand combat is more fever-dreamy than his vehicle chases, but just as inspired.

The second half of the film is a rather abrupt shift out of the Bartertown bowels into desert wilds, where Max meets a feral society of children. Across a dozen or so reviews of this film, I’ve found a consensus that this second half of the film outright sucks, and I disagree. It is lesser than the film’s first half, but still a fully-formed world and encounter for Max. It just lacks some of the divine spark of the previous movie-and-a-half. There’s something slightly off about it, like Miller and his team needed a few more drafts on the script to brainstorm some wrinkles for this faux-primitive society of Aboriginal-coded children. But I really love the on-location vistas, especially the sand that flows like water and swallows characters like a murky swamp.

The climax involves a return to Bartertown and, because this is indeed a Mad Max film, a wild, prop-filled, nerve-rackingly physical vehicle chase. This one includes planes, trains, and automobiles for some variety, but it is unfortunately not quite as sublime as the analogous sequence of Mad Max 2, which borders into masterpiece territory.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome’s production was tinged with tragedy: Byron Kennedy, Miller’s producer and creative partner since they bootstrapped Mad Max together in the late ‘70s, died in a helicopter crash. This so deeply affected Miller that he withdrew from the making of the film for awhile, handing some directorial duties to the stage and TV director George Ogilvie.

The film is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, both because of its discordant structure of two mostly unrelated halves, and because there’s a certain sparkle and passion missing, especially, as noted, in the second half. Much of this can probably be attributed to Miller’s disengagement during parts of the production; or maybe the Mad Max magic had stretched to its limit in three outings produced within five years (released within six). It’s still entertaining and satisfying and memorable, easily outstripping the original as a standalone film, but a diminishing return following the electric Part 2.

After Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Max would disappear for three decades. But, in one of the great comeback stories of blockbuster cinema history — and one of the only scenarios where a legacy sequel outstrips the originals — the franchise would return in the seismic Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015. Hold onto your butts.

And it’s not just any dystopian road epic… It is prototypical and quintessential. Coming at Mad Max 2 with fresh eyes, it suffers a bit simply for being the basis of every instance of post-apocalyptic worldbuilding in the decades since. But it has been so influential because it is an excellent film, and quality like this endures. Whenever you see or read about a dusty, junkyard, lawless, retro-industrial society in speculative fiction, it’s indebted to this film.

Mad Max 2 shows George Miller blossoming into a genuinely great director in just his second film ever. The sense that his imagination was constrained by budget in his debut is validated here: Every scene, every art detail, every outrageous action sequence is bursting with memorable images and touches. (And it’s still really not that big of a budget at all: $4.5 million Australian dollars, which ballparks to $10 million USD today; or just a fraction of the budget of, like, Renfield, let alone real tentpoles.)

The production is bananas and maximal. There’s a slight tint of kinky camp and homoeroticism to it — the ostentatious costumes and theatrical posturing that make up much of the film would not be entirely out of place at a weird sex club. And yet, at its core, it’s in service not of something trashy or exploitational, but a heart-pounding thrill-ride with terrific craft and an endless sense of invention.

Whereas the screenplay for Part 1 feels hastily, almost whimsically, composed, Mad Max 2 is very intentionally a hero’s journey. Max (Mel Gibson) has a great gift — driving — which he gradually discovers, cultivates, and shares with the world. He and the rest of the characters in the story — and especially the audience — know Max is the only one who can lead the great final journey to paradise, escaping Lord Humungus and Wez. (Thus it’s a bit of a twist ending when their salvation lies with others.)

Max’s quest has two main witnesses, both nameless: First, a gyrocopter pilot (Bruce Spence) who first tries to entrap Max but eventually becomes his ally. And, second, a feral boy (Emil Minty) with a razor-sharp boomerang and who admires Max. The pair are, like Max, outsiders to the fuel compound at the center of the story, but both are important figures in its legacy.

The story traces a besieged fuel depot in an increasingly inhuman dystopian world that had been merely suggested in the original. As a band of marauders grows bolder and more invasive of the gas cache, the peaceful inhabitants of the depot need to find a way out while protecting their goods. Enter Max, who recalls an empty, abandoned tanker truck he saw at the start of the film

The film is filled with great vehicular set pieces. You can’t go more than about four minutes without some unusual action sequence, and there’s an astonishing variety to them given that feel so unified in vision. Sometimes they’re shot in visceral close-up, sometimes from a distance; sometimes standing still and chest-thumping, sometimes driving 100 MPH (or 161 KPH since this is Australia). The entire film clocks in at a wonderfully-paced 95 minutes including credits. You never quite get a chance to catch your breath (in a good way).

The real barn burner is the final chase sequence. It brings to life what I imagined SNES Mario Kart to be in my head when I first played it when I was seven years old: A cutthroat, whiplash violent race filled with stunts and sabotage and inter-vehicular weaponry. It possibly tops even the truck chase of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the pantheon of imaginative, precisely-rendered, vehicle stunt action scenes.

There are only a couple things holding me back from declaring Mad Max 2 a masterpiece. First is that the entire affair is a little bit silly. I can’t quite put my finger on whether its merely Miller’s irreverent Australian sensibilities shining through, or whether he erred too much on the side of goofy-fun cheese for my own taste. The result is that I never really felt a sense of danger or immersion as I watched: it’s sheer spectacle, which is fine, but puts a ceiling on its stratospheric greatness.

The second is some missing element of the film’s soul in its soundtrack. I’m not saying Mad Max 2 should have had a full-on romantic symphony for a score, a la John Williams’ work in Star Wars, but as Miller shifted the story from the ramshackle Mad Max to something more epic and classical in narrative structure, a more grand musicscape would have gone a long way. Bringing back Brian May (unrelated to the Queen guitarist) as composer is one of Miller’s few missteps here.

Regardless, Mad Max 2 is an absolute gem of a film, a real coming-out party for the immense imagination and prodigious talents of director George Miller and action star Mel Gibson, who is imposing and excellent here. From the title and screen caps, you might suspect a run-of-the-mill cornball genre flick, but The Road Warrior is something extraordinary.

* (The real reason for the Road Warrior marketing and branding, as far as I can tell, is that Mad Max didn’t have the name recognition in the west at the time of its release, and distributors didn’t want to turn off newbies who would avoid it having missed the original.)

My main conclusion watching Mad Max is that when you got it, you got it. George Miller’s got it. Mad Max is only barely coherent as a story and thrown together on a micro-budget such that the set pieces barely exist, but Miller brings to it a panache and frenzied energy that is deeply inviting. This is especially true in the off-kilter opening act, which throws us into a half-formed cinematic world and dares us to try and figure it out. The film’s second half is a bit more conventional as dirt-cheap and slightly trashy exploitation, but it never quite loses the glint and the verve. Miller called the film “a silent movie with sound” — i.e., the narrative is driven by kinetic energy rather than verbal energy, the film’s script secondary to its propulsive motion. This is not quite the same as being an image-driven film; Miller simply did not have the means to make many real images. But there’s a whirlwind quality to Mad Max that I find commendable.

The flip side is that there’s very little substance to the film, and when the ramshackle charm starts to wear off in the closing act, there’s not much of anything to latch onto. The sense that we’re watching a spit-and-bubble gum miracle diminishes once the concluding arc takes shape: As Max (Mel Gibson) chases down the goons who attacked his family (and, indeed, goes “mad”), Mad Max starts to resemble a dollar-store, feel-bad revenge B-picture and not an oddball lark.

The franchise’s much-lauded “dystopia” setting isn’t really all that dystopian in this outing. If I hadn’t known what the series becomes, I’d have just told you that we were hanging out in Australia: The desolate landscapes, mismatched technology, strange culture, and bizarre argot feel like they’re from an alien planet, and yet 1970’s Australia might just as well be an alien planet. Oil shortage was a genuine part of ‘70s Australian life. And Mad Max isn’t the only film to capitalize on this unusual national tenor: it is merely the most famous “Ozploitation” film — a cottage industry of cheaply-produced pictures leveraging the country’s geographic and cultural quirks.

Every indie Australian film I’ve ever seen, including Mad Max, regardless of genre — a total of about five spanning the ‘70s to the 2010s — has had a similar energy to its dialogue. I don’t know if this is how Australians actually talk or just how they write, but there’s a strange flavor to it: it’s abrasive, unmodulated, and bantery. Characters will talk more than you expect them to without saying much of meaning, with weird turns of phrase and unexpected bits of nastiness tossed in. Check everything from dance film Strictly Ballroom to teen dramedy The Rage on Placid Lake and you’ll hear something similar.

The making of Mad Max is just as interesting a story as the film itself, if not moreso: Miller was a doctor and a film buff in his early 30s when he and a bud who had once made a short film together for fun, Byron Kennedy, decided to make a feature together. They hired a bunch of locals to help them piece it together. Miller read Pauline Kael’s famous (and largely discredited) book Raising Kane about how Citizen Kane’s screenplay was actually more attributable to journalist Herman J. Makiewicz than to Orson Welles. He decided he would hire his own journalist to write the script for his story, and connected with James McCausland who had no past screenwriting experience. The pair watched and discussed a bunch of movies they wanted to mimic, then cobbled together their own screenplay.

When it came time to cast the lead, Miller and Kennedy wanted to hire an established American actor to increase the likelihood of international distribution, but they didn’t have the budget for it. So they hit the local acting schools to find an unknown and encountered an American-born kid who gave a great audition: Mel Gibson. Gibson is charismatic in Mad Max but ultimately doesn’t have enough to do as an actor to suggest the career he’d go on to have. Even though we don’t see too much of what makes Gibson special in this outing, it’s an obvious casting home run for the Mad Max team.

The shooting itself was a roller coaster. Miller went a little bananas. He could only get one camera lens working — an anamorphic 35mm lens — and he used it for everything: close-ups, wide shots, tilted angles, strapping it to vehicles, etc. Everything. An actress was injured four days into filming, so they scrapped their progress, recast, and restarted. The crew closed roads without police permission (though the Melbourne police reportedly found the project endearing and eventually assisted). It was so hectic and stressful that Miller briefly quit the project.

Vehicle stunts were orchestrated not by a professional stuntman or technician but by a local motorcycle racer, Ian Goddard. He did such a good job that there were no vehicle-triggered injuries or unexpected accidents despite some stunts that are rather incredible (and presumably dangerous) relative to the budget.

Miller and Kennedy hired an editor who couldn’t finish the project, so they completed it themselves on a homemade film editing device that Kennedy’s dad jury-rigged in a friend’s apartment. They spent day and night editing it for over four months.

And when it was done, four years after Miller and Kennedy first commissioned the script, the movie was distributed by AIP and WB across the globe and became an absolute smash. It made over $100 million in box office receipts against a budget of about $400,000. It was the most profitable film in cinema history until The Blair Witch Project. Miller’s answering machine was flooded with Hollywood offers. He bounced around a few American projects but ultimately decided to fly back to Australia to make a sequel to his breakout, this time with a bigger budget and more ambitious scope. Mad Max 2 would be released barely two years later.

Mad Max remains a fascinating, terse little film. If I really followed through on my promise to try and view the film “context-free,” I might give it a soft thumbs down as a quirky, cult B-pic with some haywire energy that’s too rough around the edges to recommend. But the context inevitably draws me in. Understanding it as an icon of low-budget filmmaking and the seed of a fascinating, groundbreaking directorial career makes it worth the watch.

For the next hour and a half, George Miller considers the ways that stories are still useful. They can help us understand things that science hasn’t and can never explain — matters of the heart and soul. Love, beauty, grief. The things that make us human and connect us to each other.

Alithea — who has been hallucinating mythical creatures — purchases a trinket at a tourist shop, and when she gets back to her hotel room, she rubs it. A Djinn (Idris Elba) pops out and offers her three wishes. But Alithea is a narratologist, meaning she knows and understands stories from across generations and cultures. She knows, for example, that wishes inevitably backfire on the protagonist. Alithea decides that the only logical solution is to not make any wishes at all. But the Djinn is bound to be her servant until the third wish is made; he is not free until she makes her wish. Thus begins a standoff and a battle of wills.

They kill the time by telling each other stories of their lives. So, in case it wasn’t obvious from the title and the fact that this involves a genie in a bottle, this is also a riff on One Thousand and One Nights. The rest of the movie plays out alternating between vignettes about the pasts of Alithea and the Djinn with segments in the present showing their growing appreciation and understanding of each other.

It’s a thoughtful and thematically expansive story. It touches on all sorts of big ideas. For one, it’s a metafictional work on the nature and power of narrative. It is also a romantic story, a heightened version of the way lovers can only come to know each other deeply through little slices of each other’s history accumulated over time.

It is also a reckoning of isolation — and, if read allegorically, of the social impact of COVID-19. Alithea spends most of her time alone, hardened to loneliness and desensitized to existential emptiness. She’s depressed and scared to leave her cozy home. When she’s finally face to face with someone, she doesn’t quite remember how to act. I definitely have been feeling those emotions as lockdown restrictions become a thing of the past.

Swinton and Elba are both terrific, and they have excellent chemistry together. They make an odd couple, but as the film ignites the romantic sparks between them, their connection is extremely touching. In a just world, Swinton would be a dark horse awards season candidate: She reins in an inherently over-the-top concept and straddles a line between delusion and intimacy.

The real star, though, is Miller’s groundbreaking filmmaking with John Seale at the helm as cinematographer. The film’s look is radically artificial and digital. The visual sheen is impossibly clean and airtight. The Djinn’s magic effects are bold and startling, with Crayola saturation on the CGI. The interior whites of Alithea’s hotel room, meanwhile, are inhumanly immaculate, a reflection of the gaping void in her life. It never stops looking surprising.

The digital effects might remind viewers of movies and shows that look “cheap” or “fake,” but Miller applies them with artistry and cleverness (though unflinching artifice): For example, a hazily distorted composition of Alithea and the Djinn entwined recalls the shape of the lamp the Djinn had been trapped in.

The ending is a slight letdown; it’s clear that Miller didn’t know exactly where to take a story so clearly built around the concept of waiting. In particular, I think Miller gets a bit too cute about the way he toys with the viewer on whether the Djinn and his actions are a vision only in Alithea’s head or something corporeal and visible to other people. A few scenes toward the end suggest one end of this spectrum, then flip-flop to the other in a very coy way.

But it is, overall, a moving and thought-provoking film. It’s small and idiosyncratic in some ways; mythically large in others. And I appreciate the film’s underlying optimism: Although some of its stories are unhappy, the vision of humanity they add up to is one where connection between souls is restorative and creative and can help us understand the inexplicable.