Steineded How sad is this?

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

samirakel I come from Palestine, when I started watching this mini-series, I was mentally prepared for the common western biased production of The Palestine cause, I am surprised at the end, that this was not only unbiased to any party, but also, shed more in my conscious on the British position, the Jews misery in Germany and later their perspective to occupy our lands and renaming our country. The drama was great, not a common Hollywood Bad Guys Vs.Good Guys BS. It gave me an urge to watch again and again and show it to my parents, relatives who are all refugees, a great and intelligent production, I strongly recommend it to anyone. If I was not Palestinian, or involved in this story, I still find a great story line, intelligent script and acting.

kenalbertson Some of the reviewers obviously based their rating on their personal political stance. There is a reason that this time period and the events covered in this series are very seldom the topic of film or television. Inevitably it makes the Jews look bad. After all, it was the Jews that were invading. The Arabs were defending their homes. This is not a popular subject these days. All credit to the producers and staff of this series for their courageous efforts. Having gotten that out of the way, the series held my interest, entertained me, and motivated me to further research on the time and place dealt with. In my view, this makes it worthy of praise no matter how many people try to discredit it and lower the viewer rating.

jontic A great piece of intelligent television. Biased? Didn't seem to spare anyone. Pretty much every group was shown acting horrendously, but also how much of those actions arose/arise from the context, and were compelling and difficult to avoid. Palestinians, British, the Isrealis, none demonised despite the awful things they all did and do, and as such it was really a remarkable feat. It is very hard to find that middle ground, (and that is also the problem for those in Isreal who want peace too). Great performances from Christian Cooke and Clare Foy. Clare in particular played the not terribly likable ingénue with distinction and subtlety. It isn't Hollywood, not evil v good, no heroes and no villains. The violence is shown as solving nothing and just leads to more vile acts of attrition. The story that holds it together has some artificiality, but does manage to run the two threads, 1947-8 and 2010 together very well.

Guy I had reservations about THE PROMISE. After all, this is a four-part, eight-hour long miniseries, taking part in two time periods about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This tricky issue tends to be reduced to propaganda by partisans from both sides. Unfortunately Peter Kosminsky is such a partisan and he delivers a rant in the form of melodrama, not helped by tired direction, a thin script and poor history.The story is partly set in 2005 and partly in the period 1945-8. In 2005 a young British student named Erin finds her grandfather's diary. Through the diary we follow Len, her grandfather, as he serves with the British Army in Palestine from 1945 to 1948. This becomes significant as Erin travels to Israel with a friend and finds herself trying to fulfil a promise her grandfather made all those years ago.Kosminsky's pitch is essentially ethnic Jewish self-criticism in which he castigates the Israelis for the bloody way in which they founded and have maintained their state. Unfortunately this means that he isn't really very interested in either the Palestinians or the British. The Palestinians appear only as victims and exercise no agency of their own. Erin/Len largely act as eyes for the viewer. By far the most interesting parts concern the Israeli family of Erin's friend and their internal dynamics (grandfather is an ex-Irgun, the parents are good liberal Israelis, the son is a former soldier working for peace, the daughter has just been conscripted for the IDF). Erin (apparently based on Kosminsky's daughters - God help them) is an ignorant slag who manages to sleep with most of the cast for no discernible reason, who is often bafflingly obtuse (demanding driving lessons from a Palestinian when her epilepsy means she isn't allowed to drive) and spends most of her time in a sullen pout. She's also a bit of an idiot - when the Israeli's try to bulldoze a Palestinian house she chains herself and a young child to a pillar inside. Endangering kids much? The whole thing is then rendered instantly facile when her Israeli chum promptly gets out a pair of wire- cutters and breaks the chain before taking her outside. Much of her time is spent prompting people to provide long, boring exposition in case the audience are idiots. Incidentally her epilepsy almost never features in the story and serves no purpose.Len meanwhile is a such a mass of contradictions as to not exist as a proper character. Supposedly a veteran of Arnhem, a tough Para and a working class lad from Leeds, he is played with a doe eyed passivity, broken only by moments of shrill anger and unconvincing heroics (all the combat scenes are silly and exist only to liven up the trailers). His loyalties are supposed to be tested but really he just rolls with the flow, transferring his loyalties to whichever side (Arab or Jew) has received the most victim points that episode. Rather than bother to build a character Kosminsky just manufactures scenes every so often where Brits are beastly to Arabs/Jews so that Len can swan in and save them so that we know he's a hero. Probably his finest moment is when finds his Jewish girlfriend tarred and feathered and promptly decides that what a traumatised woman needs is...yet another painfully ugly sex scene.The script makes very little pretence to be even handed, picking (rightly)on every Israeli fault whilst ignoring Arab ones. Both Len and Erin go on a learning journey from pro-Israeli/Jewish to anti- Israeli/Jewish (as opposed to pro-Palestinian/Arab). In Erin's timeline this works OK as she meets the Jewish religious settlers (not very nice people), sees the humiliating checkpoint system, the chronic discrimination against Palestinians and discovers the results of the ethnic cleansing from 1948. However this method works very badly for Len's story. So you get the arrival of the Holocaust survivors, the King David Hotel bombing, the Affair of the Sergeants and the ethnic cleansing of Arab villages in 1948. But there is little else but these big events and as a result the whole narrative is very jumpy, with no sense of the passage of time.A lot of the problems are down to the ham-handedness of the direction and deeply mediocre work by the DP. There is no feel for the period 1945-8 and the impression is often of children playing dress-up. Many scenes are risibly bad with pride of place going to a terrible exploding CGI door that flies straight at the viewer like one of those gimmick shots from a 3D movie. There is also precious little tension, mood- building, immediacy or physicality. Moments that ought to be shocking or scary or blood-pumping are instead flat. There is also a tendency to manufacture fake drama, as when Len leaves his unit (who are under attack) to rescue the son of his Arab friend, escorts him several miles and then abandons him 100 feet from safety whereupon the kid is promptly shot by a sniper. It makes no sense and is utterly contrived. Incidentally, Len then returns to his unit, with several hours having passed, to discover that...literally nothing has changed.There are numerous historical oddities. For instance, Len is a Sergeant but appears to have no officer and is casually let into high-ranking meetings. For instance, the impression is given that Israel started the 1948 war and that it was a purely Israeli-Palestinian fight. For instance, Kosminsky's belief that the use of collective punishment by the Brits against Jews and by Israelis against Palestinians is unique (it's as old as time).I don't have a side in the Israel-Palestine dispute and frankly don't care. My interest was largely in the British.This is poor history, poor writing and poor drama.