I read The Beach during a summer off from University after finding it on a relative's bookcase. I'd just seen the movie and I remember thinking how much better the book was than the movie (which I'd enjoyed, but that always seems the way). I spent the best part of a year backpacking about a year after that in the very early 00s - so still remembered the book well.
When I got to the Koh San Road (in particular) after about 6 months in Asia, I remember thinking how much it had changed from Richard's experiences in the book, and how much the other places I'd been to (Laos, Cambodia etc) probably felt more like the book.
I went to the Koh San Road a couple of years ago and really couldn't believe how much it had changed. The islands as well. In the early 00s, I was amazed at how connected Asia (Thailand in particular) was compared to the UK - I had a small web business, I could email pretty much every day (obviously phones weren't connected back then), there were Internet cafes _everywhere_. But now it was like a late 90s Ibiza - the chilled 'watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe had totally been replaced with music, booze and nitrous oxide balloons. 24 hour party.
I think even now the book would be a great read - particularly if you'd never holidayed in Asia. But times have changed, and Niven's comparisons at the end of the article are pretty apt. It'll be interesting to see how the further future looks back at stuff like this. Everything moves so quickly and periods like this are just so _fleeting_. Fitzgerald and Hemingway - it sort of seems like you can place them anywhere in a period of like a hundred years. But books like The Beach - you're thinking, "right, this is after Gameboy, but before mobile phones and Google..." Anyone younger than me read it and have thoughts? If you've been the Thailand or not?
Same experience. Backpacked around Thailand in the early 00's a few weeks after reading the book. I could see that it had changed, but it still had a bit of the vibe from the book IMO. Very few things were "neatly packaged". Some friends went to the islands recently and it seemed more like a frat party than anything else.
> ‘watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe
Is now available in Hampi, India. And I’m sure many other places.
The whole ‘the beach’ setting felt a lot closer to India (about 5 years ago) than any of my experiences in Thailand. Arambol, Goa & Hampi specifically.
It may not be like that now. I suspect these kinds of places/experiences will become rarer and rarer: the democratisation of travel is, I think in many ways, a good thing (especially in a world where equality is prized), but it also has downsides, such as the fact that everywhere and everything becomes commercialised and oversubscribed.
I'm 25, just got back from hiking in a somewhat remote part of Georgia (the country). Haven't read The Beach, but got a good sense of it from the article.
I think hiking culture, where you either camp or stay in people's homes as you move from village to village through the mountains, is one of the last/best ways to travel and stay disconnected. No cell service in a lot of these places, no room for a laptop in your backpack. Also, no party culture in these hostels, just appreciative eating of a simple meal at the end of a long dusty day of hiking. Read a book and record the day in your journal. Have a snickers bar and a few beers for dessert.
Lots of young people from eastern europe and israel doing the hikes in Georgia. No tour companies (yet), the infrastructure isn't good enough. Still, as you chat with other trailgoers, you realize that everyone is generally following the same webpage/guide because it's the only one on the internet. Georgia is on trend now and being marketed everywhere, so I expect the infrastructure to be built up similar to the way popular destinations in SE developed in the past 20 years. Quicker if they are able to join the EU.
Check out Switzerland if you're looking for a similar but less rugged experience, I did a 14 day hike there last year and can't recommend it highly enough. You can do it with wife/kids/managing a job for sure if you pick the right route. And easy to access from the UK.
To your other point - yes, I feel like time periods are condensing from war/early tech infrastructure-defined 20-30 year intervals where one author is able to capture a zeitgeist snapshot of their era, into a large gray mass/melting pot of media that tells all stories at once, but no specific story at all.
The meta story is one of globalization and blurring of identity, and a growing global middle class, where it's difficult to capture and affirm exactly what is going on because everything can and does change in an instant.
The modern-day equivalent might be a book about traveling Instagram influencers/festival goers living the jet set life between LA, NY, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bombay, Ibiza, etc. This last line of the review is dark, but basically nails it:
What will the generation that reads the novel now, and those that come after them, find in its pages? They will find what generations before them found in the pages of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, as their protagonists drank and smoked and gazed at the landscapes of Italy, or Spain, or Africa: characters damaged by where they have come from, looking for release – or correction, or illumination – in strange new corners of the world and finding only disaffection, ugliness, self-absorption and ego.
Finding only the things they have brought with them.
hardly a utopia (very tough life for locals out there, especially in winter) and tourism powers a good portion of georgia's economy, so i won't shed too many tears if a few more generally respectful and well traveled HN readers decide to make the journey over
I loved this book and I loved the movie too. I really like how it was sort of marketed/positioned as a Leonardo DiCaprio teen movie but ultimately when you see it, the film has a much darker, serious tone like the book.
The trailer, as I recall, contained things like the idyllic/titular beach, pop music of the time (Moby, All Saints), and a beautiful girl (Francoise) - all the trappings of a teen movie. But when you see the movie, it feels much more like Heart of Darkness. The themes of what it means to be civilized, isolation and madness, and travel and foreignness are all fairly sober topics and are perpendicular to what you find in most teen movies.
I would say of the films I saw in that time in my life, it was among the most mind altering.
Agree, also his newest film 'Annihilation' is on Netflix UK right now and it's great - a genuinely disturbing sci-fi/horror movie. I don't want to spoil it so I'll stop there.
Could someone (tersely) tell me what makes Ex Machina so brilliant and interesting?
I watched it and came away with "That's a decent film with a boring ending."
In an egotistical moment I might dismiss the opinions of my non-CS friends as "Oh, these are new thoughts to them," but a lot of technical people seemed to love it to.
Yeah, it's the classic AI box experiment (Hey, maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky used to win this by getting you to dance with him, who knows). I didn't find the ending boring given the very grave consequences and the chilling way it played out.
I hadn't heard of Eliezers AI Box. That is literally the film.
Googling around that and the movie name led me to this essay - some interesting stuff about Turings imitation game, and what Caleb should have done, and whether Ava was right to do what it did. http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/women-in-ai-boxes-ex-mac...
Essentially: Put tech frat bro, white knight, and trapped woman in room. Turn time crank.
I generally have issues with stories that feature static characters (they feel contrived, no matter how well textured). And to me Ex Machina felt exactly like that, albeit using the concealing veil of delayed exposition to create an illusion of dynamicism.
To put it another way, if you knew everything the movie tells you about the nature of all the characters at the start of the movie, couldn't you have predicted the outcome from the beginning?
And if so, then what's really being said?
If we're looking at interesting statements in gender politics, I'd contrast it negatively with something like Stephen Universe.
The philosophical concepts were not new to me, but it brought them to life in an interesting way, and allowed me to talk about some cool ideas with my friends who had seen the film.
Trying to avoid spoilers but I thought how she was able to detect sincere and equal empathy and her response was at least interesting. Perhaps cliche but was curious if it would have went the other way.
I would promote it on the principal that I would like to see more smart, character driven movies. You don't have to have to have your mind blown to like a piece of art, and this film gave me an excuse to talk about paperclip maximization with my mom!
Have you asked yourself if everything you see in the movie is as presented? SPOILER: In other words, are the people people and the AI AI? (That's the wow.)
Yes, there are plenty. Now we can debate perception all day, but I think this sampling is enough to pique interest..from what I can remember:
we don't know caleb's history
he has a big, unexplained scar on his back
there is a lot of focus / talk about iterations of the AI
caleb is the one locked in an observation room when he has talks with ava
the cutting himself scene is...odd and unnatural
he never, ever gets drunk
there's a weird scene towards the end where nathan refuses a drink from caleb and goes out his way to make him take a sip and asks how it tastes (he does not answer)
the conversations btw nathan and caleb are not exactly natural, in that nathan consistently prods caleb to provide more in depth/opinionated answers and not be so technical
added: wouldn't the best test of an AI be to give the AI freedom and see if it recognizes itself as AI?
> added: wouldn't the best test of an AI be to give the AI freedom and see if it recognizes itself as AI?
Not really, as "recognizes itself as AI" presupposes a difference between AI and human. Gimmicks aside (i.e. let's see what's inside me), any AI which recognizes itself as AI would essentially fail the Turing test.
To me, those bits just came off as Lost/Shyamalan-esque hand waiving without saying something definite. Anyone can write a profound question they don't intend to answer.
The spinning top in Inception, or the dream in Blade Runner, are far more intentional.
"Definite" is boring and lazy to some (like me). Giving the audience enough space for interpretation is exciting to some (like me). It's ok, not everybody has to like the same thing.
As is usually the case the book is quite a bit better. The film is still solid, but it departs significantly from the original novel is ways that somewhat ruin it. The ending in particular moves away from the original source so much it's not possible for book 2 and 3 of the trilogy to be filmed as sequels. Not necessary a bad thing, but a good indication of how far from the original source it actually is.
For what it's worth book 1 is one of the best books I've read in a long time. I've actually read it 5 times and it caused me to start writing fiction again; the detail and style of the prose really take you in and the journey is quite interesting, different and unique in an almost meditative sort of way. Highly recommended.
To be brutally honest, I felt like the movie was a very poor adaptation of a fairly poorly written book from an overall unenjoyable trilogy. I trudged through the second and third books because the premise was very interesting. I don't think Jeff can deliver a story that one, at least I, can be fully satisfied by.
I hesitate to tell people to avoid the books altogether because the premise is interesting enough and the books arnt outright awful but I really cant recommend them to anyone.
What am I missing that many other people seem to be connecting with?
I'll offer a third opinion here, which is that the book is literally not possible to recreate accurately in film using current technology.
The challenge is that in Annihilation VanderMeer is very interested in the idea of a thing which challenges on a basic level the very way humans sense things. He heavily exploits the format of writing to accomplish this. The descriptions he includes are frequently impossible, contradictory, or non-sensical. Additionally, these descriptions are simultaneously specific and vague - and this tension between specificity and vagueness is itself a property of the things he describes in addition to the narrative technique. This seems very intentional to me - but in any case it relies heavily on a subjective interpretation formed in the reader's mind's eye. It is possible to imagine a thing with these kinds of phantasmagoric, perhaps dreamlike properties, but the film medium, as we know it, doesn't allow for that kind of flexibility - the moment an image is crystallized on film, it becomes a fixed, static thing for all viewers.
So in translating this to film format I think Garland really had to have his own personal take on the ideas in the book. Personally I thought it was a good (but flawed) movie with certain superficial similarities to the book in terms of plot. There were many directions a film based on this book could go; as has been shown by many book-to-film adaptations, a novel can be more tightly packed with information than a 2-hour movie. I think Garland chose some interesting facets of the book to focus on while doing something unique.
To answer your question - "What am I missing that many other people seem to be connecting with?". As someone who thought the first book was good (but perhaps not great), here is what I felt would be compelling to most readers:
1) The book was paced and structured sort of in a Dan Brown esque way. Events move quickly from scene to scene and every chapter leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions with potentially intriguing resolutions (e.g. What is going on in Area X? What is the creature/pit/lighthouse? What information are the protagonists hiding from one another? What happened to the other expeditions? What is the literal writing on the wall?). In short, it is a mystery, which is a good hook for many readers.
2) The book leaves a lot for the reader to fill in for his or her self. You get that impression that the characters in the book are also experiencing something similar themselves in their world. This is an interesting thought.
3) The book does some unconventional things. The main characters are not identified by name, rather their profession. The main characters are all female and they are all scientists. Etc.
One of the most disappointing things to me about the movie was how it looked conventional near the end. The action- or maybe inaction- sequence was certainly different and deliberating- but the heart of the asteroid was boringly Giger, and the CGI was not great.
And reading the book really should be done before the movie. My wife didn't enjoy the book because she had the movie in her head. The plot and conclusion is very very different, but the aesthetic I feel is also different. I never pictured the area as being anything like how the movie made it, but my wife couldn't get it out of her head and didn't really enjoy the book that much.
Annihilation was not a good movie. The book was reasonable, the movie was junk. Nothing was disturbing or thought provoking. I chalk it up to the tomb raider imagery: little girl in jungle with big gun. And the final scene was filmed as a ridiculous sexual metaphor, a director just playing for the audience.
I was backpacking back in the day this was still circulating as a book. Internet was just becoming a thing but yet far from pervasive (trips to the internet café once or twice a week to "phone home") - good times :-)
I'm really glad I am old enough to have had an opportunity to live, work, and travel in other countries before social media was around. You just really don't get immersed the same way anymore with the ability to stay so connected to back home. I was able to email, and long distance was cheap, but there was enough of a barrier there that you still felt you were in a "different place".
And even then, based on your comment, what I had was a big difference compared to what was available 5-10 years earlier.
Same - this movie brought back a lot of my memories of remote backpacker's camps among the palm trees on the Mozambique coast... It did a great job of capturing the human interactions among the backpacker crowd.
I recall watching the movie back in the days when I was a child and I had no clue about backpacking. It was just weird surreal experience. 10 years later, spending 2x 3 months in India and Nepal this way, some aspects of my life changed for good.
For example I will never ever do any other type of vacation, it doesn't matter if with kids or being old (of course the nature of the trip will reflect those aspects). I will never book or plan whole vacation in advance, rather just have flight tickets, info about possibilities, and adjust plans as trip unfolds.
One is getting much much more bang for your bucks this way, especially since you generally spend less bucks to start with. Intensity of travel is much higher, one interacts much more with locals, tastes true local foods etc. Its one of those things that the more money you put in, the less rewarding and more bland experience you are getting back.
I applaud your optimism, I really do. Just don't go thinking you failed in life when you inevitability find yourself eating chicken nuggets at Disneyland for the third year running, whilst your children (that you love dearly) insist on yet another Disney Princess dress. :)
I have traveled this way since 1983, and I can remember showing up in Indonesia with my two kids, who were less than 10 at the time, without a room at 11 PM and walking around throughout the night until we found a great place to stay. I had just bought them their backpacks that year. Years on I lived with my newborn baby, my third child, in a rice-farming village in East Java for a year, and after a few months, I felt I was back in Brooklyn by identifying with the similarities of the situation and personalities of my neighbors. Travel changes your perspective both in immediate, new ways, and in long, introspective stretches. I recommend it if there is an itch you feel you need to scratch. I have never regretted any of it. I had already traveled a lot of SE Asia when I saw The Beach, and I liked it, especially the contrast between the new arrival and the has-beens of backpacking. The Jungle (2017) is another film worth watching based upon the true story of Yossi Ghinsberg and his ordeal in the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia back in the 1980s.
It's far from _inevitable_. As the GP writes, it is the spirit and openness of the journey that is important and this can work for families and older people. Of course you adapt to suit your party.
When backpacking with kids, we only relocate every week or two, not every few days. We have rest days for schoolwork. When cycle touring, we don't go more than 50km in a day. We eat a lot more icecream. But it is still unplanned, unscheduled and intimate.
We did this before we had kids; those were the best vacations. South Africa, Iceland, New York and New Zealand. We booked a room for the first day or three (Australia is a 24h flight, you wanna do that) and from there planned our vacation.
There is no way I'd do it again with the kids in tow. Sure, it goes well 95% of the time. That 5% time when you can't find anywhere to sleep except a trailer park from hell or a disgustingly dirty backpackers ran by drunk/high perverts is something I'd never risk with young kids.
One of our best vacations was one of the few package tours we did, this time to Egypt. It was via a company who do backpacker-style vacations. It was fantastic because our guide was excellent and we had contact with the locals. They used public transport wherever it was possible too, which although uncomfortable it felt better. We did a package in this case because it's also a country which simply isn't safe to be driving around in as westerners..
I have already commented above about my experiences backpacking with children, however, I have never had the "drunk/high perverts" situation, since I was going to remote or less-traveled areas. Sure if you show up anywhere like Bali, Indonesia in the summer, you are going to be swimming in drunk Aussies doing the same as the American Spring Break crowds in Florida, however, try making it to villages where you can find a camp site, or lodging and perhaps help out the locals with a small donation of your knowledge, time (work) or money. I've fixed well pumps or small diesel engines on rice-farming tractors (the kind the guy surfs on a board behind to flatten the previous harvest's remains before sowing the next batch).
> Its one of those things that the more money you put in, the less rewarding and more bland experience you are getting back
I was lucky enough to do a trip a while back with a relative that gets travel discounts and comps, and we combined budget backpacking with stays at some of the finest hotels in Thailand, including this place: https://www.sixsenses.com/resorts/yao-noi/destination
I recall that the breakfasts were sublime - they had something like 20 different varieties of ice cream, and fantastic pastries. The chef was originally from California and would talk you through the various delights on offer that morning. A fantastically peaceful, beautiful place, and an experience that's difficult to get on a budget.
Watched the movie as a kid not knowing what I was going into, and I remember being forever traumatized by the shark attacks, the guy that slices his vein and splurts blood everywhere, and the atmosphere as a whole. Would LOVE to watch it again though.
I watched it again last year, having sort of enjoyed it when it first came out (I was the right sort of age). It's quite an uneven film, to be honest - there's a lot of talent both behind and in front of the camera, but it never really materialises into anything particularly important or, by the end, even all that interesting. The weird sequence that's part Apocalypse Now, part video game, towards the end, has not aged at all well (though from this review in The Guardian it would seem to be quite faithful to the book, which I think I have actually read but remember nothing about!).
I'll have to rewatch. I saw it when I was much younger too.
In defense, I think "weird" is overly dismissed in film. The intent of some sequences like this is to make the audience surprised or uncomfortable (the soundtrack at Do Long Bridge in Apoc Now?), which gets dismissed as a director simply making bad choices.
My personal bugaboo is programmers chuckling knowingly at the CG in Hackers: "That's not what code looks like."
Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen?
> Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen?
Man if that's what debugging is like for you, I need to get ahold of whatever you're on when you crank up gdb. For me, accountants poring over tax returns and corporate statements is much closer to the reality of it.
I'd definitely describe my flow state as much less about characters and more a synesthesia-eque mental visualization of data structures and interfaces.
May I ask what you find compelling about Sunshine? I really, really wanted to love the film and I did for the first 2/3. But it felt like the final act lost its way.
Maybe I just like Garland's films but not his signature. If you have other recommendations I'd be interested.
When I got to the Koh San Road (in particular) after about 6 months in Asia, I remember thinking how much it had changed from Richard's experiences in the book, and how much the other places I'd been to (Laos, Cambodia etc) probably felt more like the book.
I went to the Koh San Road a couple of years ago and really couldn't believe how much it had changed. The islands as well. In the early 00s, I was amazed at how connected Asia (Thailand in particular) was compared to the UK - I had a small web business, I could email pretty much every day (obviously phones weren't connected back then), there were Internet cafes _everywhere_. But now it was like a late 90s Ibiza - the chilled 'watch a pirated movie in the evening with a beer/smoothie' vibe had totally been replaced with music, booze and nitrous oxide balloons. 24 hour party.
I think even now the book would be a great read - particularly if you'd never holidayed in Asia. But times have changed, and Niven's comparisons at the end of the article are pretty apt. It'll be interesting to see how the further future looks back at stuff like this. Everything moves so quickly and periods like this are just so _fleeting_. Fitzgerald and Hemingway - it sort of seems like you can place them anywhere in a period of like a hundred years. But books like The Beach - you're thinking, "right, this is after Gameboy, but before mobile phones and Google..." Anyone younger than me read it and have thoughts? If you've been the Thailand or not?
I'm getting old. :-\