YMMV / The Beach

• Awesome Music:
  • The Moby song "Porcelain" fits perfectly with the atmosphere of the scene where Richard and his friends marvel at the beauty of the beach.
  • Also All Saints "Pure Shores" which plays over Richard and Françoise's kiss. It is massively catchy and got a lot of airplay in the UK.
  • "8Ball" by Underworld.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • During the massacre near the end, Richard hissing. Like a cat. (It's actually a Call-Back to the scene where the drug farmers' guard monkey hissed at him, but it's definitely weird and highlights Richard's derangement at that point.)
  • The scene where Richard imagines himself in a video game.
• Cult Classic: Panned by critics, hated by general audiences, torn apart for incredibly corny acting and nearly killed Danny Boyle's career... but eventually found its way as a cult film, with a small, dedicated fanbase. Ironically, the base seems to be more centered on the time-capsule aspect of the film and how entertainingly bad it is, rather than anything else.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The shot of Leonardo DiCaprio washed up ashore now brings to mind the opening of Inception.
• Moral Event Horizon: The entire island community cross this when they decide to leave a severely injured Christo alone in the forest simply because he was becoming a burden on them and keeping them from having fun. Sal herself goes downhill from here when she is willing to kill Richard because the farmer says that is the only way to remain on the island.
• Narm Charm: The cult following the film developed over the years is build almost exclusively on how innocently dumb and dated it is.
• Questionable Casting: In the novel, Richard is an embittered, cynical, twenty-something hipster English backpacker. In the film, he's played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
• Squick: The food poisoning, tooth pulling, Christo's injury, the climax...
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film reveals the time of its creation right off the bat, and not just with its Y2K-era soundtrack and style. It opens with Richard describing Southeast Asia as a place where "dollars and Deutsche Marks get turned into counterfeit watches and genuine scars". Two years later, Germany would retire the Deutsche Mark as its currency upon the introduction of the euro. A later scene also has Richard imagining that he is in a video game — specifically, a PlayStation 1 game, complete with a filter designed to make the film resemble the blocky, primitive 3D graphics of the time. The closing scene takes place in an internet cafe with a long row of G3 iMacs, a computer whose bubble-like design was then on the cutting edge of The Aesthetics of Technology but which is now seen as a time capsule of early '00s computing (Apple itself moving on to its more famous aesthetic not long after). Finally, Sal's effort to keep her island paradise a secret could only have worked in the time before smartphones capable of remotely uploading pictures directly to social media became the norm; notably, Françoise is seen using a disposable camera in one scene, while Richard makes a call on a pay phone. The last point arguably makes Sal even more of a Tragic Villain, as a modern-day viewer knows, with the benefit of hindsight, that her island will eventually be discovered and exploited by the outside world despite all her best efforts.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Francoise cheats on her boyfriend and then chews Richard out for cheating on her, and is not called out on her hypocrisy — especially since Richard was pretty much raped by Sal.
• Values Resonance: With the rise of "influencer" culture and concerns about over-tourism, the events of the story feel like a salient warning.

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