Trolls are lashing out at Christian Bale's new movie before it even premieres
Christian Bale's newest movie is getting hit hard on movie rating site IMDb, because not everyone is down with its portrayal of the Ottoman (now Turkish) government's 1915 mass killings of Armenians.
But with an entire section of the movie's site devoted to spreading the message about the Armenian genocide and other mass killings, the Turkish community is pushing back against The Promise.
A Turkish online forum similar to 4chan organized a ratings attack on the yet-to-be released film, according to the Washington Post. Before its Friday release, it was already at a 5.3 out of 10 rating with almost 50 percent of the 123,212 ratings cast as a low "1."
The movie, co-starring Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon, is described as taking place in the crumbling Ottoman Empire amid "war-torn chaos."
Turkey doesn't recognize the mass killings of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide -- even though dozens of nations around the world call it such.
The Hollywood Reporter noticed the ratings trolling began immediately after the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. The fact that the film's release lines up with Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on Monday only adds extra fodder to the Turkish backlash against the film.
With so much controversy over terminology and the film's topic, The Promise's IMDb page is probably not the best place to get a sense of the film's quality.
Topics Film
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
