The poster is really too good for this movie.
The plot is nonsensical and trite. Two friends are disillusioned with city living and move out next to the beach to live ... on the beach with no sustenance? When they move to the beach, they discover the grass isn't so green on the other side as they thought and they encounter a few hardships.
Why two seemingly urban, well-adjusted, and well-dressed young men and their girlfriends would just pick up and move to the beach with no manner of sustaining their livelihoods and build a rickety shack there I don't know.
Along the way we'll see generational fishermen struggling, pollution from a factory in the river, sickness, and even death. None of it is dealt with long, but you can vaguely see that the movie wants you to feel indignant about this or that social injustice. There's just not enough of a connection to spark anything.
For example, at one point the lead engineer for the factory says he wants to have a public banquet for the residents of the city they built the factory in, so he asks his henchman to set it up. The henchman kind of chuckles when he gets the money, as if he was going to do something corrupt with it. Then the event proceeds as planned and the henchman barely speaks at all from that point on.
The film ends up displaying much but saying little, and it doesn't display the things it does well at that. The acting is poor, the dialogue is weak, and the whole thing is poorly directly. Additionally, the whole thing ends dramatically for no reason at all.
Honourable Mentions: The Mosquito Coast (1986). An engineer decides to move his family to an undeveloped village in Central America and build his paradise there, but things go wrong. It's full of action and great acting and the plot makes sense.
