“Hello Mark. So what you’ve been up to… for 20 years?”
Is what Danny Boyle’s uses to greet us in the opening line of the trailer of Trainspotting 2. A nostalgic, emotive and intoxicating trip back to the Irwin Welsh’s creations and the hit from 1996.
The trailer itself doesn’t show us too much of the film. We just know that Mark has returned to Scotland after 20 years. So that means that all of them (Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie) are older. It seems that their lives haven’t changed that much, with Renton being a bit of the exception. We can also see that Begbie is back and by the stints of drugs and dynamic camera shots we can presume that they haven’t kicked all habits away. Mark’s return doesn’t go as smooth as planned.
T2: Trainspotting would be Boyle’s first sequel. Even though Welsh published his own sequel Porno, in 2002. It seems logical to be from his most iconic, and to many his best, film yet. Something that the fans of this mythical picture have been waiting since 2013. And as Renton itself and the rest of the crew of T2 invites us to: “Choose watching history repeat itself.”
The movie looks pretty good and it looks like if they had kept the essence of the much-quoted “Choose life” motif. Adapting perfectly to the 21st century, not only with the camerawork that made the first film so memorable but keeping the same angst and existential feeling. When again, Renton’s background narration reminds us that “You’re an addict” but now to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, internet porn and a virtual/viral reality feed by social media “So be addicted.” he says.
But as we wait for the movie to be released in the UK on January 27, 2017, in the US on March 3, 2017, and World Wide on March 10. We can’t just help but to feel excited, like if we are gonna see a childhood friend while we wait to see these lovely, yes lovely, heroin addicts from Edinburgh again so in the meanwhile “Just be addicted” to something else.