0
“First there was an an opportunity then there was a betrayal…”
20 years ago, Danny Boyle brought Irvine Welsh’s signature gang onto the big screen. A crew that didn’t choose life, life insurance or a career. After two decades he hits back with what was ‘Porno’ and transformed it into T2, modernising the story and presenting a sequel that shines a new light on what addiction means in the brave new world.
While the first film focused on the rebellion from an aesthetic obsession with certainty, safety and boundaries, the sequel dives in into the world that changed and consequently blurred the moral lines that used to govern the so called society. It seems clear that John Hodge, the film’s screenwriter, understood that and created a script that succeeds in being funny and absurd while highlighting the issues that the characters have to deal with as well as their past by revealing scenes from their life before the events of the first film.
These scenes are occasionally mirrored and even infused into certain scenes which expands and rewrites audience’s perspective on certain situations and characters themselves. It presents the audience with a tale about the confusing nature of human relations and the events that shape them.
T2 presented the audiences with one of the most memorable soundtracks in modern cinema, surfing on retro waves to the beat of Run DMC and The Clash until reaching the shore with more modern alternatives like The Young Fathers and even The Rubberbandits.
The Trainspotting Anthem, ‘Lust for Life’ by Iggy Pop, also makes a return, picking it up from the ground with a helping hand from The Prodigy. Out of all these tracks, one song stood out more than anything else for all the good reasons. ‘’Silk’’ by Wolf Alice managed to perfectly capture film’s mood, highlighting the feeling of loss and lack of hope in the world were for some ‘’God never reached out in time’’.
The film doesn’t try to imitate what it used to be. Instead, it cleverly adapts to the new environment creating a distinctively new identity that will now stand the test of time. Danny Boyle and his team delivered a worthy addition to an immortal masterpiece that should satisfy even the most loyal, hardcore trainspotters, It sets a new standard in filmmaking when it comes to sequels and makes a bold statement about the world’s evolved addiction with relatively pointless distractions that makes the world go round whether you choose life or not because at this point it hard to tell the difference for better or worse.