Hotel Mumbai (Armie Hammer, Dev Patel)

[AResistor]

Hotel Mumbai is an Indian-American-Australian thriller film directed by Anthony Maras and written by John Collee and Maras. It is based on the 2009 documentary Surviving Mumbai about the Mumbai attacks in 2008 at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in India.



If you get the chance to see this movie, definitely recommend it (it's releasing this March). I was able to catch it at TIFF last year and it's one of my top ten films of 2018 (when it ran the festival circuit). It was one of the most intense films I've ever seen (just to give an idea of how many new films I see in a year - in 2017 it was 161). It's the first terrorism film that truly makes you feel like you're there - for this reason though, it may be too intense for some.

 

[SPO2 Dalisay]

While the chief chef was mentioned in the pre credits bit Dev Patel's Arjun felt like a composite character. I did wonder if an ex Spetsnaz Afganistan War vet was actually among those in close engagement with the terrorist?

While most story telling these days would have focused on the special forces engagement they really did downplay the Black Cats when they finally arrived for a final shootout.