Watched on Netflix

"The Beach", which is garish, subversive in its montage technique and at times escalates into the experimental, makes it a cynical pleasure to generate wanderlust about it, to deliberately prepare universally valid postcard motifs and to actually grant Richard, the protagonist, a place in this Garden of Eden where he can realize himself away from a society infested with cancerous ulcers.

Allegedly.

Writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle repeatedly look the viewer in the eye very deeply and all the more provocatively they ask us: "That's exactly what you want, isn't it? Freedom. Natural infinity. Inner peace. Maybe you ARE the destination you have gone to after all. Especially when only you and a handful of other people know this destination, too?

Wrong.

And because Richard has really fallen into the assumption of having arrived in a parallel universe, he must bear the consequences. Little by little "The Beach", in gloriously impetuous gallantry, settles all these collective yearnings of our western world and exhibits them unsparingly as weird fantasies: There are only a fraction of people who really manage to achieve freedom because they have the courage to let go completely. The rest, on the other hand, is so domesticated by the social role system that they break at the slightest touch of independence.

Richard is the perfect example: When he finally mutates from jungle fever to Rambo in an attack, running with Kalashnikov and his headband pierce through the bushes and then succumb to a crying fit at the sight of blood, it becomes clear that he is the victim of a well-structured system contaminated by media consumption.

The most of us cannot bear reality. That's why Richard (and all those for whom he's a placeholder) never becomes one with the destination he's headed for - and he never becomes one with nature, which he would have loved to make his playground, but which, unlike his video games, doesn't let itself be conquered, but devours you if you don't reckon with it.

Richard, however, is no Colonel Kurtz, he can't face the loss of himself, but remains only a dreamer who wanted to experience something he can later remember. Then, when he sits in his own four walls, with his wife, child, dog, back on the battlefield of boredom, from which he actually wanted to escape.

Ultimately, however, he himself is the author and epitome of that yawning boredom and has thus lost the battle against himself.

In the end, the most of us, me included, are not our destination, we're just the all-inclusive holiday resort we book!