Close Menu
TechCentralTechCentral

    Subscribe to the newsletter

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    Facebook X (Twitter) YouTube LinkedIn
    WhatsApp Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentralTechCentral
    • News

      Wi-Fi or mobile? Tug-of-war over 6GHz intensifies

      25 June 2025

      War of words erupts over home affairs database fee hike

      24 June 2025

      Don’t expect Starlink in South Africa anytime soon

      24 June 2025

      Finally! Tribunal unpacks why it blocked Vodacom’s Vumatel deal

      24 June 2025

      Samsung to unveil new folding phones at July event

      24 June 2025
    • World

      Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines hits $10-billion valuation

      24 June 2025

      Watch | Starship rocket explodes in setback to Musk’s Mars mission

      19 June 2025

      Trump Mobile dials into politics, profit and patriarchy

      17 June 2025

      Samsung plots health data hub to link users and doctors in real time

      17 June 2025

      Beijing’s chip champions blacklisted by Taiwan

      16 June 2025
    • In-depth

      Meta bets $72-billion on AI – and investors love it

      17 June 2025

      MultiChoice may unbundle SuperSport from DStv

      12 June 2025

      Grok promised bias-free chat. Then came the edits

      2 June 2025

      Digital fortress: We go inside JB5, Teraco’s giant new AI-ready data centre

      30 May 2025

      Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s big bet to out-Apple Apple

      22 May 2025
    • TCS

      TechCentral Nexus S0E3: Behind Takealot’s revenue surge

      23 June 2025

      TCS | South Africa’s Sociable wants to make social media social again

      23 June 2025

      TCS+ | AfriGIS’s Helen Hulett on how tech can help resolve South Africa’s water crisis

      18 June 2025

      TechCentral Nexus S0E2: South Africa’s digital battlefield

      16 June 2025

      TechCentral Nexus S0E1: Starlink, BEE and a new leader at Vodacom

      8 June 2025
    • Opinion

      South Africa pioneered drone laws a decade ago – now it must catch up

      17 June 2025

      AI and the future of ICT distribution

      16 June 2025

      Singapore soared – why can’t we? Lessons South Africa refuses to learn

      13 June 2025

      South Africa risks being left behind as stablecoins reshape global finance

      6 June 2025

      Beyond the box: why IT distribution depends on real partnerships

      2 June 2025
    • Company Hubs
      • Africa Data Centres
      • AfriGIS
      • Altron Digital Business
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Altron Group
      • Arctic Wolf
      • AvertITD
      • Braintree
      • CallMiner
      • CambriLearn
      • CYBER1 Solutions
      • Digicloud Africa
      • Digimune
      • Domains.co.za
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • Incredible Business
      • iONLINE
      • Iris Network Systems
      • LSD Open
      • NEC XON
      • Network Platforms
      • Next DLP
      • Ovations
      • Paracon
      • Paratus
      • Q-KON
      • SevenC
      • SkyWire
      • Solid8 Technologies
      • Telit Cinterion
      • Tenable
      • Vertiv
      • Videri Digital
      • Wipro
      • Workday
    • Sections
      • AI and machine learning
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud services
      • Contact centres and CX
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Electronics and hardware
      • Energy and sustainability
      • Enterprise software
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Lifestyle
      • Motoring
      • Public sector
      • Retail and e-commerce
      • Science
      • SMEs and start-ups
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Events
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home » Top » T2 Trainspotting: a hit of nostalgia, a shot of regret

    T2 Trainspotting: a hit of nostalgia, a shot of regret

    By Lance Harris1 March 2017
    Twitter LinkedIn Facebook WhatsApp Email Telegram Copy Link
    News Alerts
    WhatsApp
    Lives going nowhere: the original crew returns in T2

    “You’re a tourist in your own youth,” says Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) to Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) in a T2 Trainspotting scene that revisits one of the original’s iconic locations — and he’s addressing the audience as much as he is his friend. Like Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting was partly about how we’re all addicted to something; T2 suggests our popular culture is hooked on its memories of the past.

    Alongside Pulp Fiction, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of the scuzzy Irvine Welsh novel defined the mid-1990s zeitgeist. It’s a such a product of its time that a sequel seems as necessary as an Easy Rider revival or a follow-up to A Clockwork Orange.

    Yet there’s a strand of self-awareness in T2 Trainspotting that redeems it; it mocks nostalgia as it embraces it. Whose nostalgia is it anyway, given that the young Renton and Simon were obsessed with Iggy Pop, Sean Connery as Bond and other residue of youth cultures that proceeded them?

    T2 reunites director Boyle with Trainspotting’s original cast, including Miller, McGregor, Ewen Bremner and Robert Carlyle, all of them visibly ravaged by time. Loosely based on Porno — Welsh’s so-so sequel to Trainspotting — the film catches up with junkies and lowlifes Renton (McGregor), Simon “Sickboy” (Miller), Begbie (Carlyle) and Spud (Bremner) two decades after the events of the original film.

    Renton is back in Edinburgh for his mother’s funeral, having hotfooted it to Amsterdam with all the proceeds of a big score the reprobates pulled off in Trainspotting. The mostly episodic sequel follows Renton’s efforts to make good with (or at least not be killed by) his former friends, whose lives have turned out much as you would expect from their trajectory in the first film.

    Booze-fuelled psycho Begbie is in prison. A seedy, coked-up Simon is shacked up with a young Bulgarian escort (newcomer Anjela Nedyalkova), in partnership with whom he videos rich, unfaithful husbands in flagrante and blackmails them. And the sympathetic, simple-minded Spud is suicidal after failing to kick his heroin addiction and make a successful home life for himself.

    A toast to betrayal: Jonny Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor and Anjela Nedyalkova in T2

    Even Renton, the most successful of them, faces divorce, retrenchment and financial ruin. Poignantly, Renton and his friends ache for the very things that he rejected in Trainspotting’s nihilistic “choose life” monologue — the family, the big television, the dental cover and the fixed-interest mortgage. (Appropriately, in T2 he delivers an updated lament about social media, slut-shaming and reality TV to a bored 20-something).

    Boyle is canny enough to know that Trainspotting’s cultural impact and youthful vigour cannot be replicated — it was a blast of energy that seemed to come from nowhere. Its gallows humour depiction of shiftless youth abandoned by society captured the underbelly of the Cool Britannia years; it was also a sneering, foul-mouthed rebuke to the tourist postcard image of regal Edinburgh.

    Boyle doesn’t try to be as subversive with T2, which is a mellower, more mature picture than its predecessor. The Scots accents are softened somewhat; the hyperkinetic, gimmicky filmcraft is toned down. And the film is infused with the pathos of wasted youth, missed opportunity and the persistence of self-destructive habits.

    Rather than wading knee-deep in the faeces, vomit and blood of Trainspotting, T2 is about heart problems, impotence, failed family relationships, the defeat of middle age. It is about what happens to the addicts who don’t die young and become good-looking corpses. If that makes it sound depressing, it’s not.

    Spud finds his voice as a writer in T2

    Though tonally different from Trainspotting, T2 shares its dark, irreverent sense of humour and features some wildly entertaining sequences. One standout sees Renton and Simon improvise an anti-Catholic anthem to distract the members of a Protestant club after robbing them. Even more than that, Boyle has affection for his mostly unlikeable characters, with the luckless Spud emerging as the film’s voice and heart.

    The original cast — with Kelly McDonald and Shirley Henderson making all-too-brief appearances — slip into their old roles with minimal effort, but its Bremner’s hangdog look and vulnerability that carries it. There is some form of redemption for most of the characters, even the loutish Begbie, but none deserve it more than Spud. Where Trainspotting was hard-edged, T2 can be downright sentimental.

    T2 doesn’t completely satisfy. Compared to the perfect use of music in Trainspotting — who can hear Perfect Day, A Lust for Life or Born Slippy without remembering scenes from the film? — T2’s soundtrack is dull. Where Trainspotting was snappily paced, T2 can go on a bit. Apart from a brief mention of gentrification bypassing Leith, Boyle seems disengaged from the malaise affecting Brexit Britain.

    And yes, some of T2’s call-backs to its predecessor are a little too smug. Yet there is no doubt that T2 is a success when seen on its own terms as a reflection on its own legacy and the way the world has moved on since. With cinema in decline, can there be a film again that will shock the senses the way Trainspotting did? Probably not, but there can be one that makes you ask, as Carlyle says: “F**k. What have I done with my life?”  — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media



    Danny Boyle Lance Harris T2 Trainspotting T2 Trainspotting review
    Subscribe to TechCentral Subscribe to TechCentral
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email Copy Link
    Previous ArticleReport proposes break-up of Kenya’s Safaricom
    Next Article Is it all over for Internet banking?

    Related Posts

    TechCentral’s top 10 movies of 2019

    31 December 2019

    TechCentral’s top 10 games of 2019

    23 December 2019

    The best movies of 2018

    31 December 2018
    Company News

    Africa’s power industry bolsters digitalisation with Huawei

    25 June 2025

    Communication costs exploding? Telviva has a fix for UK-SA teams

    24 June 2025

    Section 18A deductions and BEE points – a strategic choice for business compliance in 2025

    24 June 2025
    Opinion

    South Africa pioneered drone laws a decade ago – now it must catch up

    17 June 2025

    AI and the future of ICT distribution

    16 June 2025

    Singapore soared – why can’t we? Lessons South Africa refuses to learn

    13 June 2025

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2025 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.