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Maybe we've wildly misinterpreted the film and its meaning

Despite the series being so firmly, firmly identified with New York, the film takes place mostly in Abu Dhabi in the UAE, the result of Samantha (Kim Cattrall) being asked to work on a hotel deal by a Sheik (or, a "chic Sheik," as the movie refers to him in just one of dozens of incidents of tortuous wordplay standing in for actual wit), a deal which is never really explained and which she does not seem to actually work on. It serves much the same function as the moment in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen when the cast teleport to Egypt. It makes no sense other than as a cheap way to move the characters to an exotic locale with minimal fuss.

Whilst they are in Abu Dhabi, the film traffics in the sort of broad caricatures of the Middle East that wouldn't have been out of place50 years ago. It indulges in lazy orientalism, playing up how mystical and mysterious the place is, whilst the characters occasionally talk about the plight of women in the Middle East in the most painfully shallow terms possible. The movie simultaneously celebrates the exoticism of the setting whilst also deriding how weird and silly the customs appear to the characters. It's this aspect of the film that makes me think that everyone has misread it; it's not a film about a group of characters whose view of the world is so stunted that it verges on the offensive and whose priorities are so horribly misguided, it's a satire on the sort of vacuous people who go to see Sex and the City 2 and come out thinking, "I want to be like them!" It's a satire of Swiftian brilliance and, much like A Modest Proposal, it seems to have been misinterpreted as a celebration of the very subject which it is actually damning. Well played, Michael Patrick King.

In a broader sense, it could also be seen as a satire on the myopic way in which some Americans perceive that part of the world. What other explanation is there for the scene towards the end in which the girls meet a group of Arabian women who, underneath their burkhas, are wearing the latest Louis Vuitton collection? Surely no film would seriously suggest that peace and unity can be achieved through commercialism, because deep down, aren't we all just vacuous morons obsessed with ephemera?

You cannot judge the entirety of a saga when only part of it has been released

Okay, maybe the satire interpretation was a bit of a stretch, but I've got a theory that perfectly explains not only why Sex and the City 2 is the nadir of all human endeavor, but why Sex and the City 3 will turn everything around.

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