Who’s to blame for popularizing reenactments of real-life terrorist attacks? Should we point the finger at “United 93” director Paul Greengrass, or maybe Steven Spielberg’s morally gray “Munich” a year earlier? The entire genre traces back to Gillo Pontecorvo’s game-changing “The Battle of Algiers” in 1966, which challenged our ideas of on-screen realism by posing as a cinema vérité newsreel.
Even so, such re-creations didn’t become chic until after 9/11, when action movies in which folks such as Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger saved the day from terrorist plots gave way to those in which successful attacks became the focus.There’s little doubt that “Hotel Mumbai” director Anthony Maras has seen all these movies and then some, although what’s not so clear is why he felt compelled to tell the story of the 2008 Mumbai attacks — a series of 12 separate terror incidents which culminated in the bloody siege
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