I mean, it was. Hijacked with 50,000 1-star reviews on IMDb after only three screenings, one of which I was at during the Toronto International Film Festival. Is it a good movie? Of course not. I panned it in my review at TIFF. In fact, I think I was too kind with my C+ review for The Film Stage, which you can read about HERE.
Here's a blurb from my review at TIFF:
"One can feel the importance of retelling these events when it focuses on the right circumstances, but when The Promise sags with cluttered, obvious tropes that have similarly downgraded countless war movies before it, it’s a disappointment. If George set his sights on capturing the effects of this tragic stain in history rather than love-making, we might have gotten a drama worthy of the talent involved."
The film comes out on April 21st.
On a side note, as I wrote 10/25/16, there is much controversy surrounding this film:
"The Turkish government is trying to stop "The Promise" from getting any sort of mainstream media attention. 86,553 votes have been cast on IMDB for the film, 55,126 of which are 1 star rating. The other 30,630 are 10 star ratings. Yikes. It is quite clear that some kind of power or force is trying to stop this film."
"There have been only three public screenings of the film, I was at the premiere and saw it at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this September and thought it wasn't very good, mostly due to the unnecessary love story added into the plot, but the Turkish Government's behavior here is atrocious. They are trying to silence the voice of ancestors and the pain they inflicted upon millions of people because of the genocide they created way back then. They have yet to recognize what happened, so a movie depiction is way out of their train of thought."
Here's what the film's director, Terry George, had to say to CBS:
“It can’t have been 50,000 individuals decided after we had two screenings in Toronto to give us 1 out of 10. It seems like a miraculously spontaneous thing to happen, so I definitely think that was a bot or series of bots to give us that vote.”
“Then we had the counter reaction from -- which I genuinely think was 25,000 individual votes from the Armenian community who then voted 10 out of 10. It brought in the whole question of IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes -- the whole question of manipulating the internet reviews and people being swayed by that.”
“I think the strategy unfortunately works to some extent because it’s confusing and distracting to people and throwing up smokescreens,” he said. “It doesn’t allow the truth to be as clear, and some people use these sites to determine whether or not they’re going to see the film. Hopefully the truth will shine and we won’t be subject to that.”
