Paradise lost

Rating: 4/10 (13 November 2005)

While attempting to be a dark and thoughtful film, The Beach simply struggles to find a voice and to be taken seriously. There are some good ideas about disasters in paradise (or paradise at a cost), but these ideas have similarly been done before. The film makes an effort, but it struggles to capture the characters and overall meaning. The only good thing about the film is the cinematography. If they had put more emphasis on the characters and used the cinematography to capture the characters' feelings more appropriately, then this would have been worth watching. Instead, it just loses itself in paradise and in the pretty cheesy events.