The Promise **½ (2016, Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon, Christian Bale) – Movie Review

Co-writer/ director Terry George’s costly-looking, beautifully shot movie is an old-style historical epic, an ambitious and good hearted but inevitably depressing look at the now little-known story of the Armenian genocide by the Turks, during the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

It is right to remember this pre-Nazi Holocaust-style story, but, as with all Holocaust movies, it makes for a difficult downer of a watch, even if you sugar the pill with a love triangle story. Trying to put an upbeat spin on depicting war atrocities, war violence and disturbing images, its positive theme is that while ’empires fall, love survives’. And, maybe also, you can try to wipe out an entire race, but somehow some will survive.

Oscar Isaac stars as Mikael Boghosian, a brilliant medical student, Charlotte Le Bon plays the beautiful and sophisticated Ana Khesarian, and Christian Bale co-stars as Chris Myers, a renowned Paris-based American journalist. All three stars are good and welcome actors, and they do their level best for the piece, though they are not seen at quite their best form.

Other well-known actors breeze in and out of the movie – among them James Cromwell as US Ambassador Morgenthau, Tom Hollander as Garin, Jean Reno as the liberating Admiral Fournet, Tamer Hassan as Faruk Pasha  – so quickly you imagine there must be a much longer version of the movie about somewhere.

However, the film’s best achievement is one of historical record. The fact that 80 per cent of all Armenians were systematically executed by the Ottoman Empire is worth remembering and the remainder’s survival equally worth celebrating. And that is what, to its huge credit, this film does. The genocide remains unacknowledged by any Turkish or US government.

Terry George is also the maker of Hotel Rwanda (2004).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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