9 ms·

Alex Garland’s cult novel The Beach, 20 years on

86 points by samclemens 8y ago

ratsimihah 8y ago
Watched the movie as a kid not knowing what I was going into, and I remember being forever traumatized by the shark attacks, the guy that slices his vein and splurts blood everywhere, and the atmosphere as a whole. Would LOVE to watch it again though.
- bshimmin 8y ago
  I watched it again last year, having sort of enjoyed it when it first came out (I was the right sort of age). It's quite an uneven film, to be honest - there's a lot of talent both behind and in front of the camera, but it never really materialises into anything particularly important or, by the end, even all that interesting. The weird sequence that's part Apocalypse Now, part video game, towards the end, has not aged at all well (though from this review in The Guardian it would seem to be quite faithful to the book, which I think I have actually read but remember nothing about!).
  - ryan-allen 8y ago
    I read the book when I was 20 and it was one of the books of that time of my life that got me right in to reading. It was great!
  - otachack 8y ago
    That weird sequence is Garland's signature. He does a similar event in one of my favorite scifi movies, Sunshine.
    - antiterra 8y ago
      Danny Boyle directed The Beach, so maybe that’s where Garland got it? I believe Garland has hinted he’s intending to re-adapt The Beach himself at some point.
    - dkfmn 8y ago
      May I ask what you find compelling about Sunshine? I really, really wanted to love the film and I did for the first 2/3. But it felt like the final act lost its way. Maybe I just like Garland's films but not his signature. If you have other recommendations I'd be interested.
    - always_good 8y ago
      Might be Danny Boyle's signature. Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, and even 28 Days Later have related sequences.
      - sjs382 8y ago
        FWIW, 28 Days Later was written by Garland.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - ethbro 8y ago
    I'll have to rewatch. I saw it when I was much younger too. In defense, I think "weird" is overly dismissed in film. The intent of some sequences like this is to make the audience surprised or uncomfortable (the soundtrack at Do Long Bridge in Apoc Now?), which gets dismissed as a director simply making bad choices. My personal bugaboo is programmers chuckling knowingly at the CG in Hackers: "That's not what code looks like." Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen?
    - karmajunkie 8y ago
      > Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen? Man if that's what debugging is like for you, I need to get ahold of whatever you're on when you crank up gdb. For me, accountants poring over tax returns and corporate statements is much closer to the reality of it.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        Maybe it is different for me then? I'd definitely describe my flow state as much less about characters and more a synesthesia-eque mental visualization of data structures and interfaces.
saiya-jin 8y ago
I recall watching the movie back in the days when I was a child and I had no clue about backpacking. It was just weird surreal experience. 10 years later, spending 2x 3 months in India and Nepal this way, some aspects of my life changed for good. For example I will never ever do any other type of vacation, it doesn't matter if with kids or being old (of course the nature of the trip will reflect those aspects). I will never book or plan whole vacation in advance, rather just have flight tickets, info about possibilities, and adjust plans as trip unfolds. One is getting much much more bang for your bucks this way, especially since you generally spend less bucks to start with. Intensity of travel is much higher, one interacts much more with locals, tastes true local foods etc. Its one of those things that the more money you put in, the less rewarding and more bland experience you are getting back.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  I applaud your optimism, I really do. Just don't go thinking you failed in life when you inevitability find yourself eating chicken nuggets at Disneyland for the third year running, whilst your children (that you love dearly) insist on yet another Disney Princess dress. :)
  - timed0 8y ago
    It's far from _inevitable_. As the GP writes, it is the spirit and openness of the journey that is important and this can work for families and older people. Of course you adapt to suit your party. When backpacking with kids, we only relocate every week or two, not every few days. We have rest days for schoolwork. When cycle touring, we don't go more than 50km in a day. We eat a lot more icecream. But it is still unplanned, unscheduled and intimate.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Agreed 100% if you substitute "when you inevitably" for "if you against your best efforts".
  - eggy 8y ago
    I have traveled this way since 1983, and I can remember showing up in Indonesia with my two kids, who were less than 10 at the time, without a room at 11 PM and walking around throughout the night until we found a great place to stay. I had just bought them their backpacks that year. Years on I lived with my newborn baby, my third child, in a rice-farming village in East Java for a year, and after a few months, I felt I was back in Brooklyn by identifying with the similarities of the situation and personalities of my neighbors. Travel changes your perspective both in immediate, new ways, and in long, introspective stretches. I recommend it if there is an itch you feel you need to scratch. I have never regretted any of it. I had already traveled a lot of SE Asia when I saw The Beach, and I liked it, especially the contrast between the new arrival and the has-beens of backpacking. The Jungle (2017) is another film worth watching based upon the true story of Yossi Ghinsberg and his ordeal in the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia back in the 1980s.
rusk 8y ago
I was backpacking back in the day this was still circulating as a book. Internet was just becoming a thing but yet far from pervasive (trips to the internet café once or twice a week to "phone home") - good times :-)
- liotier 8y ago
  Same - this movie brought back a lot of my memories of remote backpacker's camps among the palm trees on the Mozambique coast... It did a great job of capturing the human interactions among the backpacker crowd.
- willmacdonald 8y ago
  I did 2 big backpacking trips, 5 years apart. One was pre-Hotmail, one post. The difference was stark. It went from sending one postcard home a month, to finding an internet cafe in every town and village in Peru. I even set up an internet cafe in Pucon in Chile. The local Linux mag had a copy of Suse Linux which I used to great effect.
  - liberte82 8y ago
    I'm really glad I am old enough to have had an opportunity to live, work, and travel in other countries before social media was around. You just really don't get immersed the same way anymore with the ability to stay so connected to back home. I was able to email, and long distance was cheap, but there was enough of a barrier there that you still felt you were in a "different place". And even then, based on your comment, what I had was a big difference compared to what was available 5-10 years earlier.
rwmj 8y ago
I can recommend his film Ex Machina. It's terrifying and brilliant.
- wgx 8y ago
  Agree, also his newest film 'Annihilation' is on Netflix UK right now and it's great - a genuinely disturbing sci-fi/horror movie. I don't want to spoil it so I'll stop there.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    I had no idea these were all by the same person. Agreed - they're all outstanding. Ex Machina might be the most interesting for HN regulars.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      Could someone (tersely) tell me what makes Ex Machina so brilliant and interesting? I watched it and came away with "That's a decent film with a boring ending." In an egotistical moment I might dismiss the opinions of my non-CS friends as "Oh, these are new thoughts to them," but a lot of technical people seemed to love it to. So what's the wow?
      - ZitchDog 8y ago
        The philosophical concepts were not new to me, but it brought them to life in an interesting way, and allowed me to talk about some cool ideas with my friends who had seen the film.
        bodi 8y ago
        Trying to avoid spoilers but I thought how she was able to detect sincere and equal empathy and her response was at least interesting. Perhaps cliche but was curious if it would have went the other way.
      - codeulike 8y ago
iamben 8y ago
I read The Beach during a summer off from University after finding it on a relative's bookcase. I'd just seen the movie and I remember thinking how much better the book was than the movie (which I'd enjoyed, but that always seems the way). I spent the best part of a year backpacking about a year after that in the very early 00s - so still remembered the book well. When I got to the Koh San Road (in particular) after about 6 months in Asia, I remember thinking how much it had changed from Richard's experiences in the book, and how much the other places I'd been to (Laos, Cambodia etc) probably felt more like the book. I went to the Koh San Road a couple of years ago and really couldn't believe how much it had changed. The islands as well. In the early 00s, I was amazed at how connected Asia (Thailand in particular) was compared to the UK - I had a small web business, I could email pretty much every day (obviously phones weren't connected back then), there were Internet cafes _everywhere_. But now it was like a late 90s Ibiza - the chilled 'watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe had totally been replaced with music, booze and nitrous oxide balloons. 24 hour party. I think even now the book would be a great read - particularly if you'd never holidayed in Asia. But times have changed, and Niven's comparisons at the end of the article are pretty apt. It'll be interesting to see how the further future looks back at stuff like this. Everything moves so quickly and periods like this are just so _fleeting_. Fitzgerald and Hemingway - it sort of seems like you can place them anywhere in a period of like a hundred years. But books like The Beach - you're thinking, "right, this is after Gameboy, but before mobile phones and Google..." Anyone younger than me read it and have thoughts? If you've been the Thailand or not? I'm getting old. :-\
- jcomis 8y ago
  Same experience. Backpacked around Thailand in the early 00's a few weeks after reading the book. I could see that it had changed, but it still had a bit of the vibe from the book IMO. Very few things were "neatly packaged". Some friends went to the islands recently and it seemed more like a frat party than anything else.
- RileyJames 8y ago
  > ‘watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe Is now available in Hampi, India. And I’m sure many other places. The whole ‘the beach’ setting felt a lot closer to India (about 5 years ago) than any of my experiences in Thailand. Arambol, Goa & Hampi specifically.
devilshaircut 8y ago
I loved this book and I loved the movie too. I really like how it was sort of marketed/positioned as a Leonardo DiCaprio teen movie but ultimately when you see it, the film has a much darker, serious tone like the book. The trailer, as I recall, contained things like the idyllic/titular beach, pop music of the time (Moby, All Saints), and a beautiful girl (Francoise) - all the trappings of a teen movie. But when you see the movie, it feels much more like Heart of Darkness. The themes of what it means to be civilized, isolation and madness, and travel and foreignness are all fairly sober topics and are perpendicular to what you find in most teen movies. I would say of the films I saw in that time in my life, it was among the most mind altering.
brainpool 8y ago
> Finding only the things they have brought with them. Well, finding out that may also be exactly what makes the experience valuable in the long run.

86 points by samclemens 8y ago

Watched the movie as a kid not knowing what I was going into, and I remember being forever traumatized by the shark attacks, the guy that slices his vein and splurts blood everywhere, and the atmosphere as a whole. Would LOVE to watch it again though.

bshimmin 8y ago
I watched it again last year, having sort of enjoyed it when it first came out (I was the right sort of age). It's quite an uneven film, to be honest - there's a lot of talent both behind and in front of the camera, but it never really materialises into anything particularly important or, by the end, even all that interesting. The weird sequence that's part Apocalypse Now, part video game, towards the end, has not aged at all well (though from this review in The Guardian it would seem to be quite faithful to the book, which I think I have actually read but remember nothing about!).
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  I read the book when I was 20 and it was one of the books of that time of my life that got me right in to reading. It was great!
- otachack 8y ago
  That weird sequence is Garland's signature. He does a similar event in one of my favorite scifi movies, Sunshine.
  - antiterra 8y ago
    Danny Boyle directed The Beach, so maybe that’s where Garland got it? I believe Garland has hinted he’s intending to re-adapt The Beach himself at some point.
  - dkfmn 8y ago
    May I ask what you find compelling about Sunshine? I really, really wanted to love the film and I did for the first 2/3. But it felt like the final act lost its way. Maybe I just like Garland's films but not his signature. If you have other recommendations I'd be interested.
  - always_good 8y ago
    Might be Danny Boyle's signature. Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, and even 28 Days Later have related sequences.
    - sjs382 8y ago
      FWIW, 28 Days Later was written by Garland.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- ethbro 8y ago
  I'll have to rewatch. I saw it when I was much younger too. In defense, I think "weird" is overly dismissed in film. The intent of some sequences like this is to make the audience surprised or uncomfortable (the soundtrack at Do Long Bridge in Apoc Now?), which gets dismissed as a director simply making bad choices. My personal bugaboo is programmers chuckling knowingly at the CG in Hackers: "That's not what code looks like." Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen?
  - karmajunkie 8y ago
    > Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen? Man if that's what debugging is like for you, I need to get ahold of whatever you're on when you crank up gdb. For me, accountants poring over tax returns and corporate statements is much closer to the reality of it.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      Maybe it is different for me then? I'd definitely describe my flow state as much less about characters and more a synesthesia-eque mental visualization of data structures and interfaces.

saiya-jin 8y ago

I recall watching the movie back in the days when I was a child and I had no clue about backpacking. It was just weird surreal experience. 10 years later, spending 2x 3 months in India and Nepal this way, some aspects of my life changed for good. For example I will never ever do any other type of vacation, it doesn't matter if with kids or being old (of course the nature of the trip will reflect those aspects). I will never book or plan whole vacation in advance, rather just have flight tickets, info about possibilities, and adjust plans as trip unfolds. One is getting much much more bang for your bucks this way, especially since you generally spend less bucks to start with. Intensity of travel is much higher, one interacts much more with locals, tastes true local foods etc. Its one of those things that the more money you put in, the less rewarding and more bland experience you are getting back.

Jaruzel 8y ago
I applaud your optimism, I really do. Just don't go thinking you failed in life when you inevitability find yourself eating chicken nuggets at Disneyland for the third year running, whilst your children (that you love dearly) insist on yet another Disney Princess dress. :)
- timed0 8y ago
  It's far from _inevitable_. As the GP writes, it is the spirit and openness of the journey that is important and this can work for families and older people. Of course you adapt to suit your party. When backpacking with kids, we only relocate every week or two, not every few days. We have rest days for schoolwork. When cycle touring, we don't go more than 50km in a day. We eat a lot more icecream. But it is still unplanned, unscheduled and intimate.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Agreed 100% if you substitute "when you inevitably" for "if you against your best efforts".
- eggy 8y ago
  I have traveled this way since 1983, and I can remember showing up in Indonesia with my two kids, who were less than 10 at the time, without a room at 11 PM and walking around throughout the night until we found a great place to stay. I had just bought them their backpacks that year. Years on I lived with my newborn baby, my third child, in a rice-farming village in East Java for a year, and after a few months, I felt I was back in Brooklyn by identifying with the similarities of the situation and personalities of my neighbors. Travel changes your perspective both in immediate, new ways, and in long, introspective stretches. I recommend it if there is an itch you feel you need to scratch. I have never regretted any of it. I had already traveled a lot of SE Asia when I saw The Beach, and I liked it, especially the contrast between the new arrival and the has-beens of backpacking. The Jungle (2017) is another film worth watching based upon the true story of Yossi Ghinsberg and his ordeal in the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia back in the 1980s.

rusk 8y ago

I was backpacking back in the day this was still circulating as a book. Internet was just becoming a thing but yet far from pervasive (trips to the internet café once or twice a week to "phone home") - good times :-)

liotier 8y ago
Same - this movie brought back a lot of my memories of remote backpacker's camps among the palm trees on the Mozambique coast... It did a great job of capturing the human interactions among the backpacker crowd.
willmacdonald 8y ago
I did 2 big backpacking trips, 5 years apart. One was pre-Hotmail, one post. The difference was stark. It went from sending one postcard home a month, to finding an internet cafe in every town and village in Peru. I even set up an internet cafe in Pucon in Chile. The local Linux mag had a copy of Suse Linux which I used to great effect.
- liberte82 8y ago
  I'm really glad I am old enough to have had an opportunity to live, work, and travel in other countries before social media was around. You just really don't get immersed the same way anymore with the ability to stay so connected to back home. I was able to email, and long distance was cheap, but there was enough of a barrier there that you still felt you were in a "different place". And even then, based on your comment, what I had was a big difference compared to what was available 5-10 years earlier.

rwmj 8y ago

I can recommend his film Ex Machina. It's terrifying and brilliant.

wgx 8y ago
Agree, also his newest film 'Annihilation' is on Netflix UK right now and it's great - a genuinely disturbing sci-fi/horror movie. I don't want to spoil it so I'll stop there.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  I had no idea these were all by the same person. Agreed - they're all outstanding. Ex Machina might be the most interesting for HN regulars.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Could someone (tersely) tell me what makes Ex Machina so brilliant and interesting? I watched it and came away with "That's a decent film with a boring ending." In an egotistical moment I might dismiss the opinions of my non-CS friends as "Oh, these are new thoughts to them," but a lot of technical people seemed to love it to. So what's the wow?
    - ZitchDog 8y ago
      The philosophical concepts were not new to me, but it brought them to life in an interesting way, and allowed me to talk about some cool ideas with my friends who had seen the film.
      - bodi 8y ago
        Trying to avoid spoilers but I thought how she was able to detect sincere and equal empathy and her response was at least interesting. Perhaps cliche but was curious if it would have went the other way.
    - codeulike 8y ago

iamben 8y ago

I read The Beach during a summer off from University after finding it on a relative's bookcase. I'd just seen the movie and I remember thinking how much better the book was than the movie (which I'd enjoyed, but that always seems the way). I spent the best part of a year backpacking about a year after that in the very early 00s - so still remembered the book well. When I got to the Koh San Road (in particular) after about 6 months in Asia, I remember thinking how much it had changed from Richard's experiences in the book, and how much the other places I'd been to (Laos, Cambodia etc) probably felt more like the book. I went to the Koh San Road a couple of years ago and really couldn't believe how much it had changed. The islands as well. In the early 00s, I was amazed at how connected Asia (Thailand in particular) was compared to the UK - I had a small web business, I could email pretty much every day (obviously phones weren't connected back then), there were Internet cafes _everywhere_. But now it was like a late 90s Ibiza - the chilled 'watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe had totally been replaced with music, booze and nitrous oxide balloons. 24 hour party. I think even now the book would be a great read - particularly if you'd never holidayed in Asia. But times have changed, and Niven's comparisons at the end of the article are pretty apt. It'll be interesting to see how the further future looks back at stuff like this. Everything moves so quickly and periods like this are just so _fleeting_. Fitzgerald and Hemingway - it sort of seems like you can place them anywhere in a period of like a hundred years. But books like The Beach - you're thinking, "right, this is after Gameboy, but before mobile phones and Google..." Anyone younger than me read it and have thoughts? If you've been the Thailand or not? I'm getting old. :-\

jcomis 8y ago
Same experience. Backpacked around Thailand in the early 00's a few weeks after reading the book. I could see that it had changed, but it still had a bit of the vibe from the book IMO. Very few things were "neatly packaged". Some friends went to the islands recently and it seemed more like a frat party than anything else.
RileyJames 8y ago
> ‘watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe Is now available in Hampi, India. And I’m sure many other places. The whole ‘the beach’ setting felt a lot closer to India (about 5 years ago) than any of my experiences in Thailand. Arambol, Goa & Hampi specifically.

devilshaircut 8y ago

I loved this book and I loved the movie too. I really like how it was sort of marketed/positioned as a Leonardo DiCaprio teen movie but ultimately when you see it, the film has a much darker, serious tone like the book. The trailer, as I recall, contained things like the idyllic/titular beach, pop music of the time (Moby, All Saints), and a beautiful girl (Francoise) - all the trappings of a teen movie. But when you see the movie, it feels much more like Heart of Darkness. The themes of what it means to be civilized, isolation and madness, and travel and foreignness are all fairly sober topics and are perpendicular to what you find in most teen movies. I would say of the films I saw in that time in my life, it was among the most mind altering.

brainpool 8y ago

> Finding only the things they have brought with them. Well, finding out that may also be exactly what makes the experience valuable in the long run.