So I saw "The Beach" a couple years ago, I missed the first ten minutes but picked it up quite fast. I loved it the first time. It's "Fight Club" meets "Lord of the Flies" and little "Blue Lagoon" (but that's more for scenery than anything else). I watched the full movie that weekend (AMC played it like 4 times that week). It came on TV every couple of months and for about a year I saw it about 5 times. I bought it for 8 dollars and proudly had it in my DVD collection. I then bought the book at Barnes and Nobles ( I say that so you know where to buy it.) so I could really appreciate it. I read a couple of chapters every night for the next month and finished it. I was shocked over some of the changes the movie had. Why change it? I realized they had to make a bankable hollywood movie... fuck them first of all. The second thing is I don't even see why, the book is considered a fantastic fiction book, was considered one of the top 10 books the year it came out. It wasn't until my second time reading did I fully appreciate the book and how much it meant to me. I said it in a early blog post, I enjoy the book more than my favorite movie. So how can I judge something I love that has been tainted in some ways?
"The Beach" opens with a backpacker named Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio, horrible casting choice, but it fits if you never read the book). So he talks about the typical thing a backpacker does after arriving in a foreign county. He follows the tourist trends where we all go to foreign places just to do what we can do at home. It's why I won't take a cruise and hate staying in nice western hotels in third world countries, I've slummed it before and it's a experience. Richard is in Bangkok Thailand where he meets while trying to sleep one night a peculiar scotsman named Daffy (Robert Carlyle). Daffy talks about a paradise on a deserted island. The next day the scotsman has slashed his wrists and has left Richard a map. He along with a french couple Etienne and Francoise (Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen, perfect casting) go this beach hoping to do something different. I personally love that idea. To many times I feel like a tourist and am not doing something exciting and new. I'd accept the beach offer in a heartbeat. So of course they get to the beach and there's a community living on one side and drug farmers on the other. The three settle in with the community and experience life changing events all so that they can get there thousand yard stare. Generation X as it was called at the time has a story to identify with (I somewhat belong in X as well, Z is a strange place).
What hurts is that 3/4 of the movie is very different from the book. If somebody told you a beloved story of yours and changed half of it, would you like it? There's still a great part, but the worse part overshadows it. Somedays I can live with "The Beach" movie and rate based on the film content, others I call it the worst thing I've ever seen (it's not, just I'm a fan of the book way to much). There's two parts in the movie that have made my very angry because it's such a change. "The Road" was a perfection adaption of a magnificent book. Nothing was changed and nothing important left out. I give that movie a 10/10 and loved everything about it (movie qualities too) "Lord of the Rings" left out material (I understand most the Harry Potter films did too), but the film product is too epic to be called weaker. Fans of the book just prefer there story, not actively hate the film adaptions. Then there are the book-film transitions that are good, but leave out detail that you really enjoyed. I read "Shutter Island" a week before I saw the movie and preferred the book, the characters were more fleshed out. Yet the story was 95% the same, so why hate it? "The Beach" has a taken concept and warped around to fit new purposes. It's hard to watch for me sometimes, but others I remember how much I liked it the first time. Either way it's a story so compelling, addictive, amazing and life changing it's worth checking out (book over movie, but if aren't a reader then the movie is a cheap supplement).
Can't rate it because the score changes every month and feels like having personal take into it.
Recommendation: Watch it, maybe it will get you to read the book
PS: I know I said like complainer here, but a book to film adaption review is something I've yet to try.
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