Look: Geostorm washes over Downtown Dubai
dubai — As a mammoth wave rises up to drown fleeing beachgoers and wash over Downtown Dubai and the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve seen this all before.
The coming film Geostorm marks just the latest movie in which Western filmmakers put the UAE in their crosshairs. The UAE offers an attractive shooting environment and Dubai’s futuristic, skyscraper-studded skyline as a backdrop.
“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 normalises it.”
In Geostorm, which opens on October 19 in the UAE and stars Gerard Butler, shows major cities around the world being destroyed. The Dubai Film and TV Commission offered an excited tweet about the footage, in which the spire tip of the 828-metre Burj Khalifa is visible in the background. The commission did not respond to a request for comment.
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
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.” Dale Hudson, NYU Abu Dhabi
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 gravitydefying extraterrestrials somehow picked up the Burj Khalifa and slammed it into London.
In the case of the Star Trek film, its producers picked Dubai because of its space-age look.
Traditionally dressed Arabs often show up for just a moment in such films. A family dines as a Lebanese-made sports car plunges down an Abu Dhabi skyscraper in Furious 7. But that moment, like a brief reference to Abu Dhabi being a global city on a map in the 2011 plague thriller Contagion, separates the UAE from the “chaos” Mideast stereotype seen in other films, Hudson said.
“It puts (the UAE) on the same political side as London and New York,” he said. “It definitely tries to make to make it a global player.”