Hotel Mumbai Trailer: 26/11, Mumbai’s Worst Terror Attacks, Comes Alive in This Movie with Anupam Kher and Dev Patel

26/11, 2008, is the day every Mumbaikar remembers with horror even today. That day, the city, we were brought to our knees; we lost friends in the terror attacks on The Taj and The Oberoi. So many families were torn apart because of senseless terror, and even though we’ve moved on, a lot of us lost a bit of ourselves over those three days. Personally, I lost friends and one that was lucky enough to be rescued from The Taj, owes his life to the staff at the hotel, who risked their own lives to save him and other guests. This is his story.

Hotel Mumbai is a movie that introduces us to Taj’s unsung heroes – the staff. Most of them risked their lives that night as they focused on saving as many guests as they could.

Could the staff have escaped? Yes.

Did they? No.

They stayed back and made sure that they kept terrified guests calm, even though each of the staff was equally terrified; they made sure that the guests stayed safe and ensured that the guests were the first to be taken to safety when help came calling.

The trailer of Hotel Mumbai opens with a scene that shows the terrorists docking in their dinghy. Then, we see glimpses of the staff at Taj welcoming guests, waiters getting ready for service and Anupam Kher, who plays head chef Hemant Oberoi, telling his staff, “Humare Taj mein, guest is God.” Soon, we see the Taj being attacked – bombs exploding, indiscriminate firing, guests running for cover, and cold-blooded murder in every sense of those words.

As the terrorists reload their automatic weapons, Dev Patel, who plays a terrified but quick-thinking waiter, Arjun, asks his guests to hide and tries to usher them to safety via a separate staircase. Patel and Kher are more than convincing in their roles. They bring alive the terror and urgency of the situation and make the movie as close to reality as they possibly can.

A very, very telling scene shows Oberoi giving his staff the permission to leave, and each of them chooses to stay back, risking their lives in order to save their guests and the hotel. Oberoi, Arjun and their team do everything they can to save as many guests as they can and the trailer shows us glimpses of the horror that unfolded back in November 2008.

The trailer shows us glimpses of the pain, horror, bloodshed and trauma that the staff and guests went through over those three days and I cringed for a large part of the two-minute trailer.

For me, this is too real, this is too close, and in many ways, this is still too raw. Hotel Mumbai is releasing on 29th November, and it will be very difficult for most of us to watch, given that this was so close to home.
But for the sake of what Mumbai went through, Hotel Mumbai is a movie all of us should definitely watch.