| THE BEACH |
 2000
- USA
Director: Danny Boyle - Reviewed by Linda 
OK, even though everyone knows that I actually admit to liking Titanic <blush>, it wasn't the Leo Factor that lured me into the theater to see The Beach. I had just finished the original book by Alex Garland a couple weeks before, and found it to be extremely readable pop fiction (great for that long daily commute on the bus) and was curious about how it would translate to film. If you've read the book, you know that it is ripe for translation onto the screen. But unfortunately the movie sucks. Leo is a bratty backpacker wandering around Bangkok, and he meets up with a cute young French couple. They find a map to the ultimate secret desert island, and when they get there, find that there is a utopia community of young, beautiful slackers, who just seem to worry about having enough batteries for their video games, and arguing over who has to make the run to the mainland to stock up on tampons and such. Huh. Not that the characters in the book aren't shallow too, but I think I didn't really want to visualize a bunch of vacant 20-year olds acting this out on screen. Anyways, Tilda Swinton is the ringleader for the islanders, and is a bit of a hard-ass, but gets things done. Oh, and there are Thai drug crop-growers sharing the island too. And they have big machine guns. Hilarity ensues. The Beach actually started out promising, and seemed to follow the original storyline for the first half of the film or so, but then it quickly unraveled. Whole crucial characters are missing in the film version, a gratuitous romance is thrown in, things are sexed up, and the climactic ending (not so climactic in the movie) is completely different from the book. Looking at the movie alone, I can't understand that anyone would walk out of the theater and think of picking up the novel, which is unfortunate, because the book is great. Really. * The movie has a good soundtrack though, if you like electronica. Director Danny Boyle may not have made a good movie since Trainspotting, but he always puts together a great soundtrack (featuring Moby, Underworld, Leftfield, and Orbital, among others). |
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