The Beach

The Beach (2000) follows a young backpacker who joins a hidden community on a Thai island, and the film itself turned into a real environmental court case. Staying in a cheap Bangkok hotel, Richard is given a map by a man: an island with a lagoon tourists know nothing about, and a community living there. He goes with two French travellers. The place really is paradise. Then someone is injured and the community's rules surface. The real subject is tourism. Richard is looking for an untouched place, and the moment he finds one he starts consuming it. That is exactly what happened to the film. It was shot at Maya Bay on Ko Phi Phi Leh. To make the bay look more tropical the producers planted dozens of coconut palms and were accused of tearing out vegetation on the dunes. A suit was filed in 1999. In 2006 Thailand's Supreme Court upheld the finding that the filming had damaged the environment. The case ran until 2022, when the studio was ordered to pay toward restoration. The second consequence was larger: the film introduced the bay to the world, close to six thousand tourists a day began arriving, and it was closed in 2018. Danny Boyle directed, from Alex Garland's novel. It runs 119 minutes. Good for: travel films, collapsing utopias, and Boyle. Less good for: the last section falls apart and there is violence.