A century after the Armenian Genocide, another war is being waged. This time, the battleground is the theater, and the fight is to preserve or re-write history.
It struck Washington Post film critic Stephanie Merry as odd that two films—each centered on love triangles in the Ottoman Empire—should hit American cinemas back to back this spring. But the movies’ sponsors lent a clue. Turks primarily funded The Ottoman Lieutenant, while The Promise was produced by a descendant of Genocide survivors, and funded by Armenian mogul Kirk Kerkorian.
Clearly, the films are competing for influence over western viewers on the contentious subject of the Armenian Genocide, blame for which the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge. But the battle for hearts and minds might just be rigged.
On March 10, The Ottoman Lieutenant hit select American theaters. Critics rolled their eyes at its “puddle of romance-novel clichés,” but Variety’s Dennis Harvey called out the “handsome and creaky melodrama” for more than its lack of originality. The Genocide, Harvey noted, was “glossed over,” while the violence was justified through a vague “whattaya gonna do… war is bad” mentality. Yet, despite this revisionism and harsh reviews, the film managed to rack up a rating of 6.6 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).
Meanwhile, The Promise—focused on the monstrosity of the Genocide—debuted at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival. It too suffered from less-than-stellar reviews, but earned a mere 4.1 on IMDB. After struggling for months to secure a distributor, the Christian Bale starrer was finally picked up by Open Road Films, and will hit theaters at the end of April.
In an interview with Variety film reporter Brent Lang, Producer Eric Esrailian blamed the powerful Turkish denialist lobby for the delay. “I’ll just say that there are some studios that have business interests in Turkey, and you can form your own opinion,” Esrailian hinted.
The denialist lobby is real, and producers have long struggled to create and disseminate Armenian Genocide films. When Disney-owned Miramax distributed Ararat in 2002, the entertainment company received thousands of negative emails that ended up crashing its website.
But the difficulty The Promise faced in distribution is not the only evidence of a plot to undermine its message.
Take a look at a breakdown of viewer ratings on IMDB, and it is clear to see that something else is at play. 35.7 percent gave the The Promise a rating of 10, while 62.9 percent gave it a 1. The statistics, though less pronounced, flip-flop for The Ottoman Lieutenant. 44.8 percent of viewers gave it a 10, while 38.3 percent gave it a 1.
Even the most polarizing of films do not see such exaggerated spikes at either end of the rating spectrum. As an example, consider Ghostbusters—one of 2016’s divisive films. Although a solid third of viewers gave it either a 1 or 10 on a ten-point scale, the ratings of the remaining two-thirds fell into a nice bell curve. In other words, many people either loved or hated the film, but most felt rather neutral about it.
Producers of The Promise also believe that a large number of people who did not actually view the film were activated by the denialist lobby to rate it poorly.
“The day after we screened the movie, 70,000 people went on IMDb and said they didn’t like the movie,” co-producer Mike Medavoy explained to Lang. “There’s no way that many people saw the movie after one screening. There aren’t that many seats in the theater.”
At time of publication, the number of user ratings had jumped to 95,284, and the film has not yet hit mainstream theaters.
Clearly, agenda-driven stakeholders have rigged the system. They aren’t voting for cinematographical excellence or compelling plotlines (in fact, they may not have actually watched the movies). They’re voting to determine which view of history prevails.
Since user ratings are patently biased, it’s up to film critics to give honest reviews that call out revisionism when they see it. As Pope Francis declared in a Vatican mass commemorating the Genocide’s centennial, “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.”
