“This ambitious and sweeping WWI-era epic arrives with the noble aim of raising awareness of the still-disputed Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million people died at the hands of the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey). Director and co-writer Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) goes for historical education by stealth, folding the chief milestones of this horror—the round-up of people in Constantinople, violent oppression and mass killings —into an English-language romantic melodrama that plays out across 1914 and 1915 and takes in city, village, forest and mountain.
“Oscar Isaac is an effective leading man, solid and troubled as Mikael, a go-getting ethnic-Armenian villager who arrives in the big city to study medicine. He's already committed to marry a girl back home, with some reluctance. A new friendship with Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), a dancer, complicates things, not least because she’s with Chris (Christian Bale) a bullish American correspondent. But the outbreak of war and the beginning of a vicious official policy toward the Armenian community and its supporters sends all their lives in a far more complex and dangerous direction.
“The Promise is handsome, accessible and illuminating.” Time Out