A stunning visual movie experience that was unfortunately brought down by the weak story.

Rating: 6/10 (30 August 2000)

Although The Beach was an interesting and well acted film, it ended up contradicting what it was trying to say at the beginning. The scenery in incredible with the beautiful white sand beach that is completely isolated from the modern world, and the transition between the two when Richard and Sal traveled back for supplies was startling and very well presented.

The unlikely premise of the film, a young traveling boy searching for the meaning of his life runs into a seemingly insane man in a third world motel room who decides to give him the map to paradise and then kill himself is a little hard to believe, but Robert Carlyle was wonderful as that man, and he easily stole every one of the few scenes he was in. After that, it was a fascinating adventure watching Richard and his two friends journey in search of that paradise. However, the unlikely events that led to the formation of that friendship is another thing that took away from the story.

After the shark attack (not the laughable one where Richard actually wrestled with and killed the shark, taking it home for dinner, but the one where people were hurt and killed), the concept of paradise was a lot more realistic. It is true that a utopian society is not possible without some element of misery, and the man who was badly injured by the shark represented that misery. You cannot have absolute happiness without absolute misery. To put it in the classy and sophisticated words of Beavis and Butt-Head, "If nothing sucked, and like, everything was cool all the time, then it's like, how would you know it was cool?"
Richard's descent into temporary madness was a very creative and well done part of the film, in my opinion. The video game cinematography was not only original but it also cleverly represented his innocence and inexperience in the world. The acting in the film was very good, I think it should be noted that Leonardo DiCaprio delivered a brilliant and amazingly convincing performance, despite his terrible acting in Titanic. Besides that, the settings and camera work were excellent as well. Unfortunately, I just think that the story was contradictory and not thought out very well. The film stressed the importance of close friends and loyalty, but it seemed like it ended up emphasizing the importance of e-mail and iMac computers. Or maybe that was just a bit of clumsy and awkward product placement, maybe they were having problems getting people to bank-roll the film. Are they trying to say that a paradise such as the one in the film, if ever found, is impossible to keep? As a whole, I think that the film is trying to portray the destructive power of greed, but the message is so clouded with other distractive elements that it ends up looking and sounding confused and contradictory.