Hotel Rwanda

An IMDb Top 250 movie

The Rwanda massacres must count as one of the most gruesome events in human history: man-made slaughter on a scale that defies imagination, comparable only to the likes of Hitler's holocaust or Pol Pot's brutal regime. And as in those cases, the main (and unanswerable) question in this is: what is it that made this horror possible? In this case, what made people enthusiastically wield machetes and bludgeon some one million people to death?
"Hotel Rwanda" is a movie about the events in Rwanda, but it is never concerned with this question. Instead, it shows a desperate hotel manager trying to save as many people as possible from the insanity. Unlike in movies such as "Schindler's List", the utter randomness of the violence is only touched upon, and focus shifts instead to the United Nations and its utter failure in preventing the bloodshed from occurring. This made the movie unsatisfying to me. I had hoped to learn more about the conflict and its origins. Instead, a Compelling Drama was put to the forefront.