As a peaceful country, we are often shocked and confused in the face of sudden terrorist incidents or war scenes. Of course, this kind of event does not occur in films such as Wolf Warrior 2 or Operation Red Sea, but in films such as "Hotel Rwanda" and "Battle of Algiers".
The Indian movie "Hotel Mumbai" once again makes us feel the panic and unprovoked trepidation in isolation. The film is based on the real horrors of 2008 that took place in the Mumbai region of India. On that occasion, for nearly three days, Islamist extremists killed 195 people and injured 295 others. Before the incident, the terrorists had intended to kill 5,000 people. This indiscriminate, premeditated large-scale terrorist incident made the "Mumbai terrorist attack" of that year become the "9/11 incident" in India.
"Hotel Mumbai" describes the entire terrorist attack process in india's "Taj Mahal Hotel" in the context of this major event.
The film begins with a terrorist's perspective, who land on the coast of Mumbai with a large number of machine guns and grenades, and after some "dispatch", two men in each team begin to reach their intended locations and carry out indiscriminate shooting.
In the noisy streets, in the busy roads, in the crowded railway stations, as long as it is a crowded place, it is where they start. The camera does not overplay the tragic situation of people being killed, and all the deaths are like a doomed but unpredictable random event.
In the first half of the footage, we don't see the slightest expression on the faces of the terrorists, who are like professional butchers who routinely walk into the livestock farm every day. Passers-by with vivid faces are like indiscriminate pigs, cattle and sheep, and the fully automatic rifles they raise are just another form of butcher knife. The bloody events in our eyes are just their job.
These grim shots at the beginning make the fear and tremor of all the guests in the Taj Mahal Hotel in the back natural, and we can feel the indiscriminate, inhuman horror. This is where the film is most successful, because the teenagers who shoot others with guns in the corridors of the hotel, in the lobby, they have no special anger towards these people, they are slaughtered because of their faith, in their view, it is a "holy war", to be able to serve the Allah, it is an honor, and more importantly, the reason for the difficult environment for muslims is these infidels.
Therefore, these well-dressed and well-groomed ladies in the hotel are not "people", they are just dirty "pigs and dogs". It can be seen from the film's Russian executives spitting on terrorists, causing the latter to be madly abusive: the massacre of these people is to purify the environment.
What is frightening is that behind this kind of thinking is another kind of "Nazi".
We are sympathetic because of this "innocent death" in the movie, and at the same time, we are difficult to live with for the "rightful" of terrorists. However, the intention of this film seems to stop here, its excellence lies in creating fear and uneasiness, but its limitation is the lack of human penetration, as well as the reflection on the situation of daily life.
The latter point in "Hotel Rwanda", but there was a strong "recoil". The ethnic conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu in the film, as well as the massacres on both sides, allow us to look at the extreme violence from a more objective perspective.
Although in the film, it is mainly the Hutu massacre of the Tutsi, but among the slaughtered Tutsi, there are also innocent groups of Hutu, and in the face of this group, the attitude of the Tutsi people begins to diverge again. This constant emotion of division, confrontation and hatred is the most powerful place in "Hotel Rwanda".
However, in Hotel Mumbai, the hotel guests, and even all the Indians in the film, are innocent, they become persecuted hamsters, and terrorists become inhuman evil cats. Although later in the film, a terrorist wanders among his family and religion, thus becoming suspicious of the religious leaders behind the scenes. But looking at the whole film, we can only see the tense atmosphere, leaving the audience to reflect on the gap behind all these horrific acts.
We are not disgusted with films that are exposed to such horror themes, but real horror events always have complex and delicate soil of reality. We also know that the feud between the Tutsi and the Hutu cannot be explained in a single film, and the same is true of "Hotel Mumbai", and it is difficult for us to understand the enmity between Indians and Muslims through this film.
However, in addition to showing the event and rendering the atmosphere, a film should also let the audience pause at the moment of machine gun fire and ask even one sentence empathetically: Why did such an event occur? Why do they hate it so much?
Because when this is done, the horror is not just an old story, but a piece of history. History is always more reflective than old news.