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DUBAI: As a mammoth wave from the Arabian Gulf rises up to drown fleeing beachgoers and wash over downtown Dubai and the world’s tallest building, you can be forgiven for thinking you have seen this all before.
The coming film “Geostorm” marks just the latest movie in which Western filmmakers put the commercial capital of the UAE in their crosshairs.
The UAE offers an attractive, tax-free shooting environment and Dubai’s futuristic, skyscraperstudded skyline as a backdrop. But amid all the computer-generated destruction, viewers are offered only rare glimpses of Emiratis, and learn little about the country or the surrounding region.
“It’s just kind of like this futuristic city that exists only to be destroyed in a very dramatic way,” said Dale Hudson, an associate professor of film and new media at NYU Abu Dhabi. “For audiences in the US used to Hollywood, it’s just another city... It’s not the Middle East, where they assume it’s going to be religious conflict or oppression of women or all the different stereotypes they have. It just kind of normalizes it.”
In “Geostorm,” opening on Thursday in the UAE and starring Gerard Butler, satellites stop all natural disasters until something goes wrong. Dubai is then apparently swamped by the Arabian Gulf, despite the fact that its warm waters are rarely deeper than 90 meters.
Previews for the film show major cities around the world being destroyed. The Dubai Film and TV Commission offered an excited, exclamation-pointed tweet about the footage of the Arabian Gulf tsunami, in which the spire tip of the world’s tallest building, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa, is visible in the background.
It is not the first time Dubai has featured in a Western blockbuster. Tom Cruise dangled off the side of the newly built Burj Khalifa in the 2011 film “Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol.” The world’s tallest building escaped being destroyed in that film, but the city-state was engulfed in computer-generated sandstorm of epic proportions.
In 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond,” Dubai stood in as Starbase Yorktown and was attacked by the forces of the lizard-like dictator Krall. Dubai was again the target of vengeful aliens in the 2016 film “Independence Day: Resurgence,” in which the gravity-defying extraterrestrials somehow picked up the Burj Khalifa and slammed it into London.