When is it too soon to exploit a recent tragedy?

Rating: 4/10 (3 April 2019)

Throughout my life I've always been bothered by films--particularly fictional--that use historical events, like the Holocaust--to prop up an entertainment and not earning or giving the respect due to living survivors. "Hotel Mumbai" is a good demonstration of why it bothers me. The incident has been the subject of many documentaries that keep their distance from exploiting the sensationalism of seeing innocent people slaughtered in a mass murder. This film jumps right into the horror of the situation and never looks away at the terror and mayhem.
It's a combination of the 1970's disaster films like "Towering Inferno" gathering an all star cast in the "Grand Hotel" model, and then setting it aflame and blowing it up, all the while murdering people nonstop between the more traditional disaster film explosions.
Even if you can resolve the moral dilemma this raises for the viewer: Getting a thrill at the cost of reconstructing a live terrorist attack, we're both invited to marvel at the luxury of one of the most famous hotel in the World and then have to witness the guests and staff summarily slaughtered. I'm not an opponent of explicit screen violence. I do mind watching "what it was like" for the victims of this massacre for no other reason than being a voyeur..
There's an attempt to weave a narrative thread that intersect or "hook" us emotionally into identifying with certain members of the cast. But it all unfolds so quickly we don't time to really gain an attachment to the "characters" we're given. The film wastes no time into getting down to what we're there to see, tacking on the devotion of the staff to their rich clientele, in a self-sacrificing manner that raises the point the terrorists are there to make. It's a very mixed bag of compromised values and motives that in there repetition give the viewer time to ask why you bought a ticket and is this something that is edifying or exploitive.
The filmmaking itself is mainly set in a soundstage in what we know is actually a famous spatial paradise that the soundstage can't recreate. So we feel boxed in and claustrophobic, but we also can't ever get our bearings on where we are or what's happening where. The use of the actual dialogue between the terrorists and there handlers is chilling. And raises, unintentional sympathy for the perpetrators because they're brain-washed and naÃ¯ve, being promised payments to their impoverished families for their self-sacrifice. If this was done purposefully, I question whether or not the survivors from the incident would find much solace.
Despite the effort to make this a "nail-biting thriller," anyone even cursory familiar with the incident knows the outcome, and due to the repetitiousness of the killing, my interest flagged several times and I found myself looking at my watch. I suppose I was waiting for the filmmakers to give us a reason they did this project other than to market a recent, actual tragedy and turn it into an action movie.