In Gerard Butler film, the city is swamped by the Arabian Gulf as natural disasters engulf the world.
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’ve seen this all before.
The coming film Geostorm marks just the latest movie in which Western filmmakers put the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates in their crosshairs.
The UAE offers a tax-free shooting environment and Dubai’s futuristic, skyscraper-studded 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 normalises it.”
In Geostorm, opening on October 19 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 metres.
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-metre Burj Khalifa, is visible in the background.
