The original Trainspotting has endured as a cultural touchstone of the late 1990's, a piece of art that spoke to latter-day Generation X'ers in a way equaled only by Fight Club. Like that film, it was something of an irreverent fluke. Like many viewers, I was taken aback by Trainspotting's blunt portrayal of heroin addiction and dark, sometimes crass humor. It wasn't a film that seemed tailor-made for the Oscars in terms of tone. Yet despite its few off-putting scenes and overall gritty tone, there was something undeniably magnetic to it, a quality that called for repeated viewings. And that's the strength in a film like Trainspotting, it only gets better with every view.
Sequels to such films are tricky endeavors. Today's Hollywood has a market secured for big sequel-friendly franchises, with mammoths like Marvel and Disney seemingly pumping out multiple entries per month. It's more of a rare occurrence when filmmakers decide to continue the story of an independent film grounded in reality, even one as beloved and successful as Trainspotting. T2 was announced several years before its release and lumbered in development hell to a point where it seemed to be both unlikely and perhaps unwise. Would it truly be a good film with a statement of its own, or merely a trip down nostalgia lane?
Despite the return of most of the original cast, director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge, it's mostly the former. T2 proves that a sequel made decades after the original will inevitably fail to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle of the original, even if it's a film of superb quality in its own right. T2 is indeed unlikely to amount to the same cultural significance and widespread popularity as its predecessor, but it's about as good a film as one could ask for. Based very loosely on the plot of Porno, writer Irvine Welsh's sequel to Trainspotting, T2 follows the heroin addicts of the first film through their passage into middle age.
Even with a number of cheeky in-jokes and nods to the original film, T2 isn't a cheap nostalgia piece. Ironically, it's a film that is very much about nostalgia, making no qualms about the fact that it's a reunion of players coming together after twenty years spent apart. The film takes the best advantage of this fact, making nostalgia and the futile attempt to recapture the excitement of youth one of its main statements. The original Trainspotting was a coming of age story about wasting one's youth and going nowhere in the ghetto, thinly disguised as a study of heroin addicts. T2 is about wasting one's adulthood and going nowhere at the steps of age fifty. In many ways, the film essentially catches up with the core audience of Trainspotting, seemingly tailor made for aging Gen-X'ers lost in the age defined by social media.
While it makes its own unique statements and has a heart of its own, T2 doesn't reinvent or change the agenda of Trainspotting so much as it updates it. There are familiar devices, such as the conniving younger female lead, who serves to point out the foolish nostalgia of the aging protagonists, similar to Diane from the first film. Though leading man Mark Renton (Ewan MacGregor) has presumably left behind his petty criminal past, he resumes his old shenanigans when he reveals his new life has fallen apart and he hooks up with the same crew. "Spud" Murphy is still good-natured and still hooked on heroin. Simon (formerly "Sick Boy") Williamson is a blackmailer and low-level pimp, and the newly-escaped Franco Begbie is still the uncontrollably violent psychopath we all love from the first film.
While their lives as junkies were portrayed with sometimes chilling
realism in the first film, the characters still had a youthful, Rock 'N
Roll rebel charm. This time around, there is no luster in their portrayal. None of them have "made it" in later life, so to speak. All are on the brink of financial and domestic failure, and all feel completely consumed in today's world driven by Snapchat filters and an obsession with fitness. Each character is given an emotional monologue about their own insecurities, each of which are surprisingly relevant and hit close to the heart. If there is a message, it isn't completely bleak. The film has a hopeful heart in "Spud", who begins to turn his nearly-aborted life around when he learns about exercise from Mark and discovers a way to turn nostalgia into engaging storytelling.
The plot of T2 is merely a vessel for its grander statements about life. If anything, the required familiarity with the first film is the film's lone weakness. There really isn't much to the story unless viewers are invested in seeing where the characters of the first film ended up. Like the original, the charm of T2 is in Boyle's stylish direction, Hodge's surprisingly emotional script and the familiar energy brought on by the original crew that flows like a shot in the vein. The film's onscreen texts, flashbacks and moments of surrealism almost recall Boyle's 2008 masterpiece Slumdog Millionaire more than Trainspotting.
Like the original Trainspotting, one of the main stars of T2 is undoubtedly its soundtrack. The original was a memorable collection of 90's Britpop and Alternative Electronic Music that perfectly encapsulated the punk attitude and snobby music fandom of the characters in their twenties. In an era where Rock as we know it seems to be on its deathbed, T2 brings together more hard-edged and forward thinking electronic artists like Scottish Alternative Hip-Hop group Young Fathers, making them sound almost as exciting and Rock & Roll as Blur or Iggy Pop. As nostalgia is at the center of the film, there are also a few appearances of classic Rock artists more mainstream than what was heard in the original. One of the film's most touching scenes is a pseudo-fantastical montage of Renton and Simon singing along ritualistically with an over-capacity club patronage to Queen's "Radio Ga Ga".
T2 won't join the annals of great sequel history as those with the luxury of being made almost in tandem with the original film, from The Empire Strikes Back to The Godfather, Part II. It does however manage to bring great relevance to twenty-year old themes and characters, which is in some ways more impressive. It also manages to make some deep observations about this turbulent day and age and how we can feel directionless in its wake. At the heart of the film lies an updated version of Renton's infamous "Choose Life" monologue from the original. After he delves into the familiar pitfalls of social media - "hoping that someone, somewhere cares", he characterizes human interaction as having been "reduced to data". Renton essentially voices the familiar criticisms we've all aimed at the age of vanity and personal branding, and it's refreshing to see them finally displayed on the silver screen.
