Real-world tragedy, on screen and off

I enjoyed -- not really the right word -- Hotel Mumbai when I saw it on Thursday night, but ultimately had a bit of a shrugging reaction to it. I was set to review it, and was planning to give it a 6/10, or three stars. In other words, a solid movie that doesn't really do anything new or particularly interesting, but is worth seeing anyway.

By the time I wrote my review on Saturday morning, real-world events had nudged that 6/3 up to a 7/3.5. Because by then, 49 Muslims had died in Christchurch, New Zealand -- only a three-hour flight from where I live -- at the hands of a white supremacist.

That news has cast a pall over this part of Australia, probably every part of Australia, although this is the only one I can comment on. I haven't read many of the details as kind of a method of insulating myself from their awfulness, but I know that either the prime suspect or one of the suspects is Australian-born. I think he was the guy who posted the manifesto and live-streamed his mass murder. Ugh.

But just the tragedy in and of itself has left us all with heavy hearts, as is the case any time innocent people are slaughtered by a monster. It feels a bit worse in this case because this part of the world has done a very good job at limiting gun-related violence, New Zealand probably even more so than Australia. There was a terrible shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996 that left 35 people dead. In the wake of that tragedy, they tightened the gun laws and there basically hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since.

Kiwis tend to be even more progressive than Australians, so while I don't know the exact nature of their gun laws, I suspect they are even more stringent than Australians'. What's more, though, New Zealand is just a place of sweet, loving people. Terrorist violence is anathema to a place like New Zealand, in the sense that there's no vocal minority stirring up racist fervor.

The stark reminder of the ways violence can tear us apart made it a bit more difficult for me to be dismissive of the parts of Hotel Mumbai that I didn't think worked as well. A critic's role is to assess both a movie's whole and its individual pieces, but focusing on the individual pieces that fall short feels more like nit-picking on some occasions than it does on others. When a movie is given such an unfortunate boost to its timeliness, it makes it all the more worth grappling with that whole than getting getting tripped up by its details.

Although the events in New Zealand will likely reduce the audience for Hotel Mumbai in this part of the world, as people will be seeking escapism at the movies if they're going to the movies at all, nudging the movie up to a 7 is my small way of suggesting to people that now is the time to engage with these issues. It may add nuance to the movie's depiction of terrorist violence that in the recent real-world event, the people of Muslim faith were the victims of terrorism rather than its practitioners. In the end, we are all sitting ducks when the insidious opportunism of hatred rears its head.