Until it goes off the rails, Danny Boyle's 2000 film The Beach seems like just another cliché story about a Westerner traveling in Southeast Asia. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Richard, a young, white, seemingly well-off American who goes to Thailand in search of the ephemeral sense of exploration that—according to the logic of young, white, well-off Westerners who do this sort of trip—can only be brought about through idealized notions of Southeast Asia and its potential for rugged adventure. When Richard and his traveler friends find the pristine island, locals grant them permission to stay under the condition that they'll keep the beach secret, so as to not disturb the lives of the people living there. Richard, of course, breaks their trust and tells others about the island, leading to a mess of lies, deaths, and the demise of their "perfect" community.

Despite the film's notable casting of DiCaprio in the midst of his post-Titanic fame, The Beach was critically panned. Written off as jumbled, navel-gazing, and overreaching, it has a critic score of only 20 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and it holds the spot as Boyle's single worst-received endeavor. Twenty years later, those marks haven't lifted.

But The Beach's message has picked up new resonance in the age of influencer culture. The controversy around The Beach and its local environmental effects only served to foreshadow a common theme in the news today; not only did the film depict the corruption of a little-known Thai paradise, but it also led to the real-life destruction of the beach where it was filmed, and over the past few years, as content-hunters and "digital nomads" have taken over our feeds, a similar situation has played out globally in destinations that were once unspoiled. Through the lens of 2020, DiCaprio's Richard is just another influencer in Thailand, living with little regard for the lives of locals and wreaking havoc on remote locations as he takes in experiences for the sake of aspirational "adventure." Back when The Beach was set, he just didn't have a cell phone to blast his every move for likes and clout.

When Boyle and crew headed to Thailand to film The Beach, they chose the island of Ko Phi Phi Le's Maya Bay for its most iconic scenes. From there, the damage that ensued from the film's production happened in phases: First, they had to make Maya Bay look like a tropical destination worthy of wooing a Western tourist. In 1999, before the film had even been released, The Guardian's John Vidal wrote that trouble was already afoot; the location—despite Maya Bay having been located in a "pristine" national park—didn't meet the standards Boyle's team had in mind at the time, and with permission from the Thai government, The Beach crew worked to change the landscape without consultation by environmentalists or locals who relied on the area for tourism. They removed bushes, despite warnings that they were necessary for preventing erosion, and planted palm trees in their place; they cleared land to widen the beach. DiCaprio and Fox, who distributed the film, assured locals that everything would be okay.