{"id":38233,"date":"2017-04-22T04:00:56","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38233"},"modified":"2020-08-15T17:11:48","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T21:11:48","slug":"movie-on-the-armenian-genocide-attracts-massive-number-of-turkish-trolls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/22\/movie-on-the-armenian-genocide-attracts-massive-number-of-turkish-trolls\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie on the Armenian Genocide attracts massive number of Turkish trolls"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the worst aspects of the First World War was the attempt by Ottoman forces to eliminate the Armenian “threat” by launching an organized campaign of murder and deportation that killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. A new movie which is set in this time has been drawing trollish attention<\/a> from Turkish detractors:<\/p>\n

The Promise<\/em>, the grandest big-screen portrayal ever made about the mass killings of Armenians during World War I, has been rated by more than 111,300 people on IMDb \u2014 a remarkable total considering it doesn\u2019t open in theaters until Friday and has thus far been screened only a handful of times publicly.<\/p>\n

The passionate reaction is because The Promise<\/em>, a $100-million movie starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, has provoked those who deny that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman Empire or that the deaths of Armenians were the result of a policy of genocide. Thousands, many of them in Turkey, have flocked to IMDb to rate the film poorly, sight unseen. Though many countries and most historians call the mass killings genocide, Turkey has aggressively refused that label.<\/p>\n

Yet that wasn\u2019t the most audacious sabotage of The Promise<\/em>, a passion project of the late billionaire investor and former MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian.<\/p>\n

In March, just a few weeks before The Promise<\/em> was to open, a curiously similar-looking film called The Ottoman Lieutenant<\/em> appeared. Another sweeping romance set during the same era and with a few stars of its own, including Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett, The Ottoman Lieutenant<\/em> seemed designed to be confused with The Promise<\/em>. But it was made by Turkish producers and instead broadcast Turkey\u2019s version of the events \u2014 that the Armenians were merely collateral damage in World War I. It was the Turkish knockoff version of The Promise<\/em>, minus the genocide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like a reverse mirror image of us,\u201d said Terry George, director and co-writer of The Promise<\/em>. George, the Irish filmmaker, has some experience in navigating the sensitivities around genocide having previously written and directed 2004\u2019s Hotel Rwanda<\/em>, about the early \u201990s Rwandan genocide.<\/p>\n

George bought a ticket to see it. \u201cBasically the argument is the Turkish government\u2019s argument, that there was an uprising and it was bad and we had to move these people out of the war zone \u2014 which, if applied to the Nazis in Poland would be: \u2018Oh, there was an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and we need to move these Jews out of the war zone,’\u201d says George. \u201cThe film is remarkably similar in terms of structure and look, even.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The movie itself, however, didn’t win over A.V. Club<\/em> critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Among the many virtues of James Gray\u2019s The Lost City Of Z<\/em> is its sense of proportion, which turns a decades-spanning historical epic into a pas de deux<\/em> between vision and madness. Unfortunately, most recent historical epics have been more on the order of Terry George\u2019s The Promise<\/em>: messes of soap and cheese. Here at last is a film that tackles the Armenian genocide by way of a flimsy love triangle and an international cast (it really captures the diversity of the Armenian people), straining so hard to show its good intentions that it doesn\u2019t bother to be directed. What does a movie that can\u2019t even mount a competent horse chase \u2014 despite repeated attempts \u2014 have to say about the murder of 1.5 million people? At least George can rest easy knowing that his film is less bungled than Bitter Harvest<\/em>, the February release that turned the Holodomor into the stuff of schmaltz. Up next, presumably, is Nicholas Sparks\u2019 Auschwitz<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Doing his best impression of Omar Sharif, Oscar Isaac stars as Mikael Boghosian, a village apothecary who agrees to marry doe-eyed local girl Maral (Angela Sarafyan) in order to use her dowry to finance his dream of becoming a doctor. (Pity poor Maral, as no two members of the cast seem to agree on how to pronounce her name.) Arriving in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Mikael moves in with his wealthy uncle and enrolls in medical school, but soon develops a crush on Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), the modern young woman who tutors his uncle\u2019s children. But it\u2019s 1914, and the Ottoman Empire is about to enter World War I as an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary and within months will begin a strategic elimination of its large Armenian minority. As if to make matters worse, Ana has an American boyfriend, Chris Myers (Christian Bale), the Associated Press\u2019 bureau chief of Armenian genocide exposition. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Promise<\/em>, by Open Road Films.<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the worst aspects of the First World War was the attempt by Ottoman forces to eliminate the Armenian “threat” by launching an organized campaign of murder and deportation that killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. A new movie which is set in this time has been drawing trollish attention from Turkish detractors: The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,370,246],"tags":[653,86,1124,122,1393,269,249,1228],"class_list":["post-38233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-middle-east","category-ww1","tag-armenia","tag-criticism","tag-genocide","tag-movies","tag-ottomanempire","tag-propaganda","tag-turkey","tag-warcrimes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9WF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38233"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59626,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38233\/revisions\/59626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}