Disaster movie puts Burj Khalifa under water

As a mammoth wave from the Persian 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’ve seen this all before.

The coming film Geostorm is the latest movie in which Western filmmakers put the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates in their crosshairs.

The UAE offers an attractive, taxfree 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 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 normalises it.”

In Geostorm, satellites stop all natural disasters until something goes wrong. Dubai is then apparently swamped by the Persian Gulf, despite the fact that its warm waters are rarely deeper than 90m.

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 Persian Gulf tsunami, in which the spire tip of the world’s tallest building, the 828m Burj Khalifa, is visible in the background.

It’s 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 an epic computer-generated sandstorm.

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.

The Star Trek film’s producers picked Dubai because of its space-age look. “We came searching for the future and found it,” Jeffrey Chernov said in 2015. However, the cast later acknowledged finding difficulty in casting a gay husband in Dubai for the character Sulu.

Geostorm is released cinemas on Thursday. in NZ