An intoxicating trip down memory lane.

As cultural paradigms shift at ever increasing speeds, it’s easy to forget just the behemoth Trainspotting was back in 1996. Twenty-one years is a long time in anyone’s book, so you’d be forgiven for forgetting the film’s cultural magnitude at the time. Caught in the grip of the dubious, press-invented 'Cool Britannia', the pop culture landscape in Britain would be forever changed in the wake of Trainspotting's release and the reverberations continue to be felt even now. Equal parts Loach and Tarantino, Danny Boyle’s striking audiovisual style was the catalyst for a new wave of British filmmaking and subsequently thrust both the young director and the film's stars into the limelight. It was, in short, a phenomenon. A phenomenon that imbedded itself into the subconscious of an entire generation (your writer very much included), and became part of a collective national memory that transcended its cinematic boundaries.

Considering Trainspotting's cultural resonance and the film's perfectly self-contained nature, it’s hard not to shake the nagging doubts for sequel that, on the face of it, feels wholly unnecessary. Considering the film industry’s continued obsession with sequels and the shaky history it has with revisiting long-gone classics, the initial prospects for T2 Trainspotting weren’t looking particularly good. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long into the film for these doubts to subside and, while those intervening decades may have slipped away, the fond memories remain intact.

Two decades have drifted by since we last met the gang and the betrayal that led to their parting. After years of estrangement, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns from Amsterdam to Edinburgh and his former life. For better or worse, he soon catches up with old comrades Spud (Ewan Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and Begbie (Robert Carlyle) and as he’s drawn, against his better judgement, back into the life he once knew. Despite the re-ignition of long-lost friendships however, the repercussions of Renton’s duplicity twenty years ago are still as fresh as ever and revenge is never far from his old friends’ minds.

With the original’s position within a nation’s consciousness fully established, it seems entirely appropriate that T2 Trainspotting’s chief preoccupation is with memory - how manifests itself in the present, how it forms us as humans, and the emotional baggage that it carries with it. Memory will always play its part in any sequel of course but, while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, what many are guilty of is cynically playing off of an audience’s prerequisite memory of an original to provoke a cheap sense of nostalgia. It's a trick we've all fallen for, I'm sure, and one that often leads to a shallow film, fresh out of ideas.

Danny Boyle’s film is as obsessed with the past as any other sequel but what really sets T2 Trainspotting apart is it’s the execution of memory, by taking its audience’s own recollections of Trainspotting and deploying them as threads to weaving naturally throughout the film. Often playful, these recalls are scattered throughout like little pockets of triggered memory, cleverly interlaced and intersecting with the contemporary action in an entirely organic way.

From little hints of Trainspotting’s classic soundtrack, to brief scenes lifted straight from the original; these memories fire off like synapses in your brain bringing a spiky, yet warm, sense of nostalgia with them. It’s an ingenious trick played by Boyle and really adds a level of nuance to what could've become a stale mess. There’s certainly a strong case to be made that T2 leans too heavily on the past, but that feels like the whole point entirely. This is not just the Renton et al's life flickering before their eyes, this is yours and, like the characters themselves, you’ll inevitably spend the film reflecting on you're own history and all the emotional baggage that brings.

Like its predecessor, T2 is primarily a character study and the film works hard to continue the development of its four main protagonists by padding out back stories, giving little character twists, and adding unexpected layers to each of them. Little pieces of character history are touched upon here, and cleaver explanations for character motivations are placed there, all in a skilfully affecting manner.

Probably the most touching (not to mention surprising) part of the film's manipulation of memory is that, despite the film’s continued deployment of Renton as the central protagonist, T2 Trainspotting gradually switches its focus towards Spud, skewing our perceptions of the past in the process. It's a fairly seismic shift in the narrative and, by the film's conclusion, T2 all but becomes Spud’s story. Spud is a character that, for all his slapstick antics, has stealthily become the film's beating heart and, through his struggles with addiction and failure we find empathy on a level that just doesn't exist with Renton, Sick Boy, or Renton. In the film’s most poignant moment, we discover Spud’s hidden talent for writing and his secret documentation of his friends’ past adventures and goes a long way to demonstrate that, despite T2’s swagger, grit, and style; the film is a touching character piece at heart.

For all its character development and directing trickery, T2 Trainspotting unfortunately falls into the same trap as the original by struggling to carry its thin, throwaway plot. With a narrative that revolves around half-baked plan to swindle the EU out of grant funding to convert Sick Boy’s pub into a brothel, it’s all a rather flimsy story to hang the film around and it’s not long before the whole thing falls by the wayside. As the film trundles on, plot holes a mile wide begin to open up and, before long, it all becomes rather messy as a viewing experience. But, while the T2's narrative imperfections are hard to hide, these shortcomings can largely be forgiven as, much like Trainspotting itself, the plot is merely the skeleton upon which the real muscle and sinew of the film are built. Let’s face it, you’re not paying your hard-earned money to watch a Trainspotting film for tight plotting and narrative nuance; you’re there for the rush, for the shenanigans, for the catch up with some old pals, and for the reflection on life.

And this is where the true joy in T2 Trainspotting lies. It’s just a great feeling to spend time with the old gang again (even Begbie) and, although this reunion is one tinged with regret, it’s more than enough to put a smile on the face of anyone close to the original. There was a real danger this reunion would feel as hollow as watching a geriatric rock band taking one last pay check for the road, but it’s to the credit of everyone involved that the film avoids this altogether. Danny Boyle, especially, must take a large chunk of the praise for the film’s success, as for the first time since Trainspotting itself, you really get the sense that he is able to fully let loose. T2 is Danny Boyle in full-blown Danny Boyle mode and it’s a pleasure to behold.

Although far from perfect, T2 Trainspotting manages to eschew many of the pratfalls that have plagued many a sequel; delivering just the right level of nostalgia to keep things interesting, while offering the kind of verve and thrills that made the original so vital. Playing heavily on the notions of memory, Danny Boyle uses every trick up his sleeve to make T2 a shared recollection experience for his audience in a way that many sequels fail to do. Few who left a screening of Trainspotting back in 1996 would've thought it needed a sequel but, now that it’s here, it all makes perfect sense. They may be two decades older, and a hell of a lot wearier, but the director and his cast still have the lust for life that made them so essential in the first place.