The Promise (2017)

The Promise (2017)

IMDB Rating : 5.6/10 (as on 22.04.2017)

PG-13 | 2h 12min | Drama, History

Set during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, The Promise follows a love triangle between Michael, a brilliant medical student, the beautiful and sophisticated Ana, and Chris - a renowned American journalist based in Paris.

Director: Terry George

Writers: Terry George, Robin Swicord

Stars: Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon, Christian Bale

IMDB link Here

 'Hotel Rwanda' director Terry George returns to genocide, with Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale stuck in a love triangle during the Armenian Holocaust.

Hoping to be the Doctor Zhivago of the Armenian Genocide, Terry George's The Promise is just getting started as a tale of forbidden love when war tears the three players in its romantic triangle apart — giving them a surprising number of opportunities to reunite and separate as they try to help defenseless loved ones survive. The event-stuffed screenplay seems frightened of the running time associated with historical romances, though, excising any occasion for reflection or distraction; as a result, the picture moves with a mechanical predictability that would be considerably more annoying with a less watchable cast in front of us. Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon (Philippe Petit's girlfriend in The Walk) make the film an easier sell to American audiences, but this will not enjoy the critical support given to George's Hotel Rwanda; compared to that flawed but affecting picture, this one looks like it was stamped by a cookie cutter.

This clockwork efficiency persists throughout, which is not to say the story is uninvolving. Michael is drafted into military service when Turkey enters the war, but a rich friend saves him with a bribe. He's intent on keeping his blossoming friendship with Ana chaste, but they are thrown together by an eruption of anti-Armenian violence on the street, forced to hide together in a hotel. Their resolve predictably crumbles. They're torn apart the following day, when he is taken by the Army to work as a slave on the railroad.

Here, we enter the thick of war-film plotting, with myriad opportunities for personal bravery and loyalty and self-sacrifice. Michael is able to escape to his village, where he reluctantly makes good on that promise, marrying secretly and hiding in the woods to make babies. For a time, Bale's Chris Myers becomes the movie's protagonist, driven by righteous anger to witness the atrocities the government denies are happening and send reports of them to American newspaper readers. We share his indignation, of course, but ours is compounded by the knowledge that, a century later, Turkey continues to deny what happened here was a genocide. We just wish a better film were making this case.

For some viewers, the breaking point in The Promise will come when Michael is commiserating with other slaves around a bonfire, and the saddest man there reports "I was a clown. In the circus. I made the children laugh." Having invested precious moments in our concern for this sad-clown side character, the movie cashes in by killing him in the very next scene.

It's commonplace, and sometimes unfair, to complain that movies like this trivialize wartime suffering by focusing on the romances of fictional characters. But in at least one scene here, the movie's sincere interest in showing the horrific things the Ottoman government did to its Armenian citizens is so thoroughly betrayed by its melodramatic agenda that it's hard not to be offended: When Michael returns from a mission to find that every single Armenian in his village has been killed, we should be horrified at the sight of so many bodies scattered on the river bank. But given the tick-tocking of the scenes leading up to it, each of them having such an obvious and predictable function, all we can do is wait for the shot of Michael's dead wife. The film will pretend to be sad for a while, but the inevitable sensation is one of relief: Finally Michael is freed from that damned promise and can get back to loving Ana.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

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‘The Promise’ Finds a Love Triangle in Constantinople

JEANNETTE CATSOULIS 

Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, “The Promise” is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.

It can happen all too easily. An otherwise highly competent director (in this case, Terry George) succumbs to the lure of addressing a real-life atrocity (here, the still-contested slaughter of more than a million peaceful Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I). Somewhere along the way, though, the need to do justice to the slain and call out the perpetrators becomes a pillow that smothers every spark of originality. Even actors with the heft of Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale — playing an Armenian apothecary named Mikael and an American war reporter named Chris — appear muffled and indistinct.

 Mikael, is not particularly sympathetic, and Chris is a humorless newshound; so when the jackboots tramp and the killing begins, their fates are of less concern than they should be. And while Mikael endures the horrors of an Ottoman work camp, and Chris and Ana are busily saving orphans at a Protestant mission, their director — who was infinitely more adept with his other genocide movie, “Hotel Rwanda” — appears oblivious to the story’s inadequacies. Aspiring to the sweep of epics like “Doctor Zhivago” and “Reds,” Mr. George achieves neither the romantic delirium of the first nor the sheer swaggering gumption of the second.

Money does not seem to have been the problem: The film reportedly cost almost $100 million, and some of it is even on the screen. Yet we never forget for one second that we’re watching actors in fancy dress; behind the curtain of cattle cars and starving workers, above the noise of the explosions, we can hear the moviemaking machinery clank and whir.

In 2002, the Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan took a more modest yet ultimately more potent path to the genocide with his underseen “Ararat.” Though not entirely successful, that film — which directly addressed the cinematic challenge of representing history — profited from sharply perceptive writing and a studious avoidance of melodrama. With even one of these attributes, “The Promise” might have had a chance.

Read full review at New York times

Movie rating 🌟🌟🌟☆☆  

Oscar Isaac tackles Armenian genocide in cliched but involving romance

Benjamin Lee

There are many reasons to criticise James Cameron’s record-breaking weepie Titanic but one of the most frustrating reminders of its success lies in Hollywood’s repetitive treatment of historical tragedies ever since. Not that the director invented the formula of placing a love triangle in the middle of adversity, but he showed that it could be extraordinarily profitable – and movies from Pearl Harbor to Pompeii have tried desperately to replicate the package.

Hotel Rwanda director Terry George has found himself another devastating, and far less covered, genocide to focus on, but in order to warrant the extravagant scale, a romantic trio has been placed front and centre.

There’s something rather dusty about The Promise as George pushes his characters through a string of soapy machinations that feel incredibly familiar. But there’s also something rather comfortingly reliable about it as well and, while a tad workmanlike, his solid direction ensures that the drama is mostly involving. It also helps that the Armenian genocide is a relatively unexplored period of history and makes for a horrifying backdrop.

Subtlety isn’t the film’s strong point – with certain lines of dialogue (“I’m going to slaughter everyone on this mountain!”) proving to be hilariously on the nose and Bale forced into some rather hammy scenes of rage. Isaac fares a little better and it’s refreshing at least for his character not to be a natural born fighter (there’s one rather nicely observed scene where he struggles to load a gun) but his chemistry with Le Bon is nonexistent. This proves to be problematic given the film’s focus on romance, and one does wish that there were more context provided to the conflict itself and a wider view of the atrocities taking place.

But rather like Russell Crowe’s similarly creaky directorial debut The Water Diviner last year, there’s something to enjoy about its traditional brand of storytelling, devoid of any irony. There are definitely more interesting and satisfying films to be made about the Armenian genocide and this is never going to become a Titanic-sized success – but it’s a solid, if overly soapy, drama.

 Read full review at The guardian

Movie rating 🌟🌟☆☆☆

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Armenian genocide takes back seat to love triangle

Lindsey Bahr  

The Armenian Genocide is a curiously unexplored moment in our modern history, cinematically speaking. That fact alone makes director and co-writer Terry George's "The Promise" intriguing enough. Historical fiction generally has it over documentaries in inspiring mass interest, especially when actors as appealing as Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon are involved.

And indeed, "The Promise" is a sprawling and handsome epic set around the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. But despite the best of intentions, the film fails to properly explain and contextualize both what led to that disgraceful episode, which Turkey to this day denies, and why it escalated as it did. Instead, "The Promise" chooses to focus in on an unsympathetic love triangle that manages to trivialize the film overall.

The goal, as always, is to personalize the events that are too big and too devastating to look at as a whole — to make it about the lives interrupted, cut short and thrown into turmoil because of external forces.

To the film's credit, he does take us early on to distant villages to witness townspeople being rounded up and walked through the desert. Women and children are executed without hesitation and, when Chris is spotted in the distance, soldiers take off after him. It's clear they don't want people seeing what they're doing. He chimes in occasionally with helpful exposition as he's dictating articles, and yet, it's a wonder whether anyone who knows little about the events will actually be able to track what's going on in a meaningful way.

"The Promise" is infinitely more interested in the triangle, dropping the three leads into convenient situations to heighten the will they/won't they/can they/should they drama, which, frankly, becomes increasingly unsympathetic as the situation around them becomes more dire.

It's unfair to critique such an utterly sincere film that does contain some riveting action and acting and even might inspire some to learn more about this moment in history, but unfortunately, the story just doesn't live up to its grand ambitions.

Read full review at Chicago Tribune