Historical Caricature Spoils a Potentially Great Film

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2015)

I enjoyed this movie, I loved the camera work, and it's colour, it's warmth as a story. I enjoyed the essential values of love in the narrative.
Some minor disjointed moments did not destroy an overall excellent effort by the films team.
As an Australian I welcomed the damning portrayal of the.British leadership, a "leadership" which led a generation of young Australians to its senseless slaughter. I also enjoyed the humanity of allowing the Turkish soldiers to show their perspective and the depiction of a frustrated Turkish people yearning to throw off centuries of Ottoman decay.
Where the film totally lost me was its clumsy and ignorantly cruel portrayal of one of the twentieth centuries most brutal genocides.
The portrayal of the Greek Army is caricature worthy of the worst of Hollywood "Cowboy and Indian" films. This lapse is surprising given the welcome humanisation of the Turkish enemy in the battle scenes. It's as if we can only cope with one moment of generosity per movie and that we always need a simplistic bogey man in the plot.
What really hurt me, on a very deep level, was the filming of a Greek bandit attack on the "Turkish" Village late in the movie. The location is, in real life, one of the deserted Greek villages left over after the 1922 genocide and transmigration.
Over 1,500,000 Greek men women and children, including members of my family, were brutally and inhumanely slaughtered in the genocide (not including millions of other ethnicities).
Their ghosts must be perplexed as to why a century later an Australian Film not only forgets them but twists reality so cruelly.
The defence of "it's only a film" does not wash.
Imagine if a Japanese Film Company arrogantly made a film actually set in one the WW2 Japanese run prisoner of war camps where Australian prisoners were systematically tortured and murdered. Imagine again if the plot had Australians torturing and killing Japanese prisoners in a distortion of history.
Now multiply that 1,500,000 times.
Filmmakers have a duty of care, if their movie purports to have even a minor historically accurate resonance, the makers of this movie have failed that duty.