The Gamer Scene In The Beach Is One Of Cinema's Greatest Crimes
When The Beach came out in 2000, star Leonardo DiCaprio and director Danny Boyle were two of the most sought-after talents in Hollywood. Titanic and Trainspotting had put both of their names on the map only a couple of years prior, giving everyone unreasonably high expectations for their first collaboration. Even the book it’s based on was a massive success for its first-time author, 26-year-old Alex Garland, who later went on to write and direct Ex Machina and Annihilation, as well as DmC: Devil May Cry and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. The movie should have been a slam dunk for everyone involved, but unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.
Two decades later, the world has mostly forgotten what a waste of time The Beach was. In a misguided attempt to cash in on DiCaprio’s star power and hormone-ridden teenage following, the movie forsakes the novel’s exploration of psychoanalytic theory and Gen X youth culture in favor of shirtless, hard-bodied co-eds and a forever spring break that feels more aspirational than foreboding, even in the end. It’s a bad movie that fails the novel in a number of ways, but one of its greatest offenses that still bothers me to this day is the video game sequence at the start of the final act. If you’ve seen the movie, you probably just cringed at the memory of it. If not, here’s a description of one of cinema’s greatest crimes.
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After months of living in paradise in a commune of young backpackers on a secret island in Thailand, things are starting to fall apart. A shark attack devastated the camp and left a trio of Swedish residents either dead or near death, division is growing as groups splinter and
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