Star Trek Beyond| 2016
Studio filming for this entry into the revamped Star Trek series was based in Vancouver, British Columbia, but when it came to finding a practical location to represent the Starbase of ‘Yorktown’, on the edge of Federation space, generous rebates took the production to the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai – an incentive which also took Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Fast And Furious 7 to the UAE.
Apart from the extended CGI backgrounds, a surprising amount of ‘Yorktown’ is the real Dubai, around the Jumeirah Lakes Towers waterfront.
The 'Yorktown' bar interior is the Grandstand of the Meydan Racecourse, a mega structure that is able to accommodate over 60,000 spectators in a mile-long grandstand. When not used for races it's a business and conference centre. You can see its distinctive wave-shaped entrance in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
What turns out to have been a bogus mission takes the Enterprise crew to the Class M planet, ‘Altamid’. The forests and rocks of the planet can be found in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Its towering peaks are the Cirque of the Unclimbables, a cluster of peaks and walls in the Mackenzie Mountains Natural Region in the Nahanni National Park Reserve, about 300 miles west of Yellowknife.
They were given their name in 1955 by mountaineer Arnold Wexler, who found himself mightily frustrated by their sheer granite walls.
The forest, though, is Stawamus Chief Provincial Park south of Squamish, British Columbia, at the dramatically-named Cacodemon Boulder, Cave Boulder and Black Dyke Boulder beneath famous climbing challenge, the Grand Wall.
