PARADISE LOST

Protests, near-fatal accidents and an irate Ewan McGregor. Tom Fordy looks back 25 years to ‘The Beach’, a film released on a wave of hype that nearly sank its director and young star

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Controversy washed over The Beach long before it hit cinemas. Directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio – who was still riding the box-office heartthrob wave of Titanic – the tale of a backpacking trip gone awry was the first major film of the new millennium, arriving on 11 February 2000. But as early as January 1999, when the film was still shooting on the Thai island of Ko Phi Phi Le, news had reached farther shores that environmental protesters were rallying against the $50m (£40m) production. The filmmakers were accused of spoiling its paradisiac beach. This was an irony as clear as the deep blue sea – and one that went far beyond the environmental impact.

Boyle himself would later admit that The Beach could have been better, calling it his “least enjoyable personal experience on a film”. But it’s arguable that it’s never received a fair shake. Twenty-five years on, it remains an imperfectly fine, of-itsmoment thriller that – much like DiCaprio’s character – loses the plot a bit at the end.

Alex Garland’s original novel, published in 1996, had been a Gen X counterculture bible. Telling the story of tourists who discover a mythical Thai beach – and its secret, self-sufficient community of hippie idealists – the book chimed with an ontrend mindset of eschewing the trappings of Western consumerism. Garland, inspired by his own time in the Philippines, had intended for The Beach to be a shrewd swipe at such a mindset, but it became a favourite among travellers nonetheless (when I asked my well-travelled partner if she read The Beach while backpacking around Thailand in the Nineties, she replied, “Everyone was reading it.”)

Boyle had come across the book in the wake of his frenetic adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting in 1996, and much in the same way as other readers: word of mouth. “It was like reading