TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentral TechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      Protests break out at Eskom plants

      23 June 2022

      South Africa scraps public mask mandate

      23 June 2022

      Crypto is not too big to fail

      23 June 2022

      The great crypto crash: the fallout, and what happens next

      22 June 2022

      Winter 1, Eskom 0

      22 June 2022
    • World

      Crypto crash survivors could become ‘tomorrow’s Amazons’

      23 June 2022

      Tether to launch a stablecoin tied to the British pound

      22 June 2022

      Tech giants form metaverse standards body, without Apple

      22 June 2022

      There are still unresolved matters in Twitter deal, Musk says

      21 June 2022

      5G subscriptions to top one billion in 2022: Ericsson

      21 June 2022
    • In-depth

      Goodbye, Internet Explorer – you really won’t be missed

      19 June 2022

      Oracle’s database dominance threatened by rise of cloud-first rivals

      13 June 2022

      Everything Apple announced at WWDC – in less than 500 words

      7 June 2022

      Sheryl Sandberg’s ad empire leaves a complicated legacy

      2 June 2022

      Tulipmania meets the real economy at WhatsApp speed

      30 May 2022
    • Podcasts

      How your organisation can triage its information security risk

      22 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E06 – ‘Apple Silicon’

      15 June 2022

      The youth might just save us

      15 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E05 – ‘Nvidia: The Green Goblin’

      8 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E04 – ‘The story of Intel – part 2’

      1 June 2022
    • Opinion

      Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

      21 June 2022

      Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

      13 June 2022

      A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

      19 May 2022

      From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

      19 April 2022

      How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

      8 April 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»Top»T2 Trainspotting: a hit of nostalgia, a shot of regret

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

    Top By Lance Harris1 March 2017
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    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
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    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
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Huawei P50 now available for pre-order in South Africa

    23 June 2022

    Calabrio paves way for SA’s cloud contact centre WFO journey alongside AWS

    23 June 2022

    More than card machines – iKhokha diversifies to reach more SMEs

    22 June 2022
    Opinion

    Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

    21 June 2022

    Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

    13 June 2022

    A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

    19 May 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

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

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

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