"Beyond Real"

24 February 2026

3 mins 30s

He said, she said.

Many people know a couple like Nate and Zoe Stevens. He engages in flights of fancy, she's got her feet on the ground. When the two come back from holiday and tell friends what they got up to, inconsistencies and contradictions are inevitable. So, er, what happened when the Hyperbolist and the Realist went to Dubai?

Nate, as you might expect, talks some amount of bullshit. He sounds like nearly every character in a Visit Dubai commercial so far, dazzled by what he's seen and prone to puffery ("A falcon appeared to guide us like a compass through the endless sea of sand"). No matter what Nate says, that's not how Zoe remembers it.

To her, Nate is less the star of his own action movie and more the guy who stumbles out of a speedboat, struggles to befriend a falcon, and overestimates his yoga abilities like a latter-day James Nesbitt. There is, however, one moment that's neither exaggerated nor underplayed—the part that made Dubai, as the copy puts it, "beyond real".

The conceit not only allows director Tom Hooper to deliver cinematic visuals tinged with humour (an area these films often struggle in), but it suggests Dubai's ready to move on from unrealistic, Hollywood-inspired expectations and sell more plausible and relatable holidays instead. OK, relatable might be a stretch, but the brand's got to start somewhere.

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