Internet trolls try to bomb ‘The Promise’ before release
THE Promise didn’t officially open in US theatres until Friday. But on IMDb, a website where people can rate movies, the film had already received more than 120 000 ratings in the runup to its release – nearly 62 000 of them the lowest: one star.
The ratings have nothing to do with the quality of the film, as it’s almost certain that most people haven’t seen the movie yet. Instead, a group of internet trolls gathering on a Turkish message board decided to try sinking The Promise with bad reviews.
The film – starring Charlotte Le Bon, Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, and directed by Terry George of Hotel Rwanda fame – focuses on a fictional love-triangle between the main characters. Two of the characters play Armenians, while the other plays an American photojournalist.
That sounds like standard silver screen fare, but it’s set against the backdrop of the mass killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, beginning in 1915. Worldwide, at least 26 countries recognise the deaths as genocide.
To Armenians, Americans of Armenian heritage and Turks, the facts and especially the nomenclature are deeply emotional issues. Turkey has long argued that the deaths were not genocide, that the death toll has been inflated and that the casualties were victims of civil war and unrest. It’s a crime in Turkey, called “insulting Turkishness”, to “even raise the issue of what happened to the Armenians”, according to the New York Times.
To keep its Nato ally Turkey happy, the US has referred to the deaths as “atrocities”, but stopped short of calling them a genocide. President Barack Obama had promised to change that before being elected president, saying in 2008 that “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence”. He didn’t keep that promise. The inevitable controversy over the film surfaced when word of its upcoming release spread to a Turkish message board similar to America’s mischief-making 4chan or its more mainstream cousin Reddit.
There, users decided to flood IMDb’s rating system with one-star reviews, hoping to tank the movie before it came out. (IMDb is owned by Amazon. Jeffrey P Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.) One user’s comment, roughly translated by the Hollywood Reporter, read: “Guys, Hollywood is filming a big movie about the so-called Armenian genocide and the trailer has already been watched 700k times. We need to do something urgently.”
As final credits rolled during the movie’s September premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, it was already among the worst-rated movies on IMDb.
“All I know is that we were in about a 900-seat house with a real ovation at the end, and then you see almost 100 000 people who claim the movie isn’t any good,” producer Mike Medavoy told the Hollywood Reporter.
At one point, the film had a 1.8-star rating on IMDb, placing it in the company of the 10 lowest-rated films on the website. The lowest rated film on IMDb, with 1.4 stars, is Code Name:
K.O.Z., a fictional account of the 2013 Turkish government corruption scandal
Some of these raters left short reviews. “The movie based on a lie so you know what to expect,” read one. “I fell for the positive reviews without realising they are written by Armenians to push their political agenda on unsuspecting movie-goers,” read another.
This is far from the first time internet trolls with a political point of view have mobilised to offer a low rating to a piece of entertainment. Both Amy Schumer’s book and latest stand-up special were targeted by members of r/the_ donald, a subreddit purportedly composed of President Donald Trump supporters.
Men, meanwhile, gave overwhelmingly low reviews to the female-led
Ghostbusters reboot. It’s difficult to ascertain if the ratings have any actual effect on the eventual sales. They ostensibly exist to help consumers sort through their many options, though some bloggers have claimed there isn’t a correlation between reviews and box office sales. The release of The
Promise fell just before the annual Armenian remembrance day of the mass killings yesterday.
“The Armenians were killed by their own government, not by the enemy, and they were killed in this systematic way that became the legal definition of the word,” said George, the film’s director.