SummaryFirst there was an opportunity......then there was a betrayal. Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him: Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and Begbie (Robert Carlyle). Other old frien...
SummaryFirst there was an opportunity......then there was a betrayal. Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him: Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and Begbie (Robert Carlyle). Other old frien...
Wiser, sadder but very much alive and kicking, T2 is a film that knows you can’t compete with the ghosts of the past. But at least you can dance with them.
After 20 years, the new main "addict" is no longer the drug addiction, the aesthetic hallucinations, but it is those same routines, the comfort zone that takes us the end of the human being to final despair. Perhaps the film has always addressed this since its first film of 1996. The city of Edinburgh is a stifling environment in which director Danny Boyle knows how to do well to interact the viewer with the iconic characters. The soundtrack and catchy phrases show us the passion to produce this fickle and captivating film in the head from the British creator Irvine Welsh. Pure and honest nostalgia. "Choose future, Choose Life".
It is more a movie about ageing, lost masculinity, and memories and less about drugs. Its great to see all of the original cast together after 20 years. I was skeptical about it until I saw it.
Considerably less ambitious or provocative than Boyle’s barnstorming first crack at these characters, T2 Trainspotting (can we please just call it “T2″?) is an enjoyable nostalgia trip about the extraordinary headache of trying to go home again.
Boyle’s verve as a director means there’s still plenty of vibrant imagery, alongside a script that, although lacking any of the electricity of the original’s state-of-the-nation wisecracks (“Scotland is a nation colonized by wankers”), is funny and disarmingly melancholic.
Where “Trainspotting’s” dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, “T2” — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.
T2 cannot hope to break the mold, as “Trainspotting” did, but Boyle and his cast rifle eagerly through the shards: a motley of plot scraps, crazed camera angles, flashbacks, trips, sight gags, and musical yelps.
A missed opportunity on multiple levels, T2 is stylistically an overwrought rehash which relies heavily on over-caffeinated camerawork and flashy effects (cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle's trademark gritty flair is overwhelmed by a flurry of Dutch angles and freeze-frames) to distract us from its essential paucity of raison d'etre.
Le pongo un 6 mas que todo por respeto a su predecesora, la cual me gustó mucho, esta, sin embargo no logró cautivarme ni un poco, es prácticamente lo mismo pero 20 años después.
It has been a very long time since I saw a movie as **** as this one. The original is a masterpiece, a movie that will stand up as well in 20 years time as it does today, as it did upon release. It was a window into a world most of us didn't know. It was human, it was gritty. Well written, brilliantly directly, amazingly scored. This is the opposite on every single level.
Firstly the movie constantly calls back to it's predecessor and not even in subtle ways. When it isn't literally showing you clips of the first movie, it is having it's characters basically re-enact aspects of it. My breaking point was in a chase scene in the final third Mark gets thrown off a car and lands roughly in front of it. I said aloud "For Christs sake don't do the smile, please don't do the smile..." Brief pause and Ewan McGregor does the exact same grin and laugh from the shoplifting scene in the first. At that point I became fairly certain that they either weren't even trying/cashing in on the first or were just so smug they once made a great movie they couldn't help but remind you every chance they got. This isn't nostalgia, it is ****.
Boyle takes every conceivable chance he gets to thrown some pointless visual effect on the screen. Spud talks about forging signatures? We need some writing in the air. Two characters are babbling inanely? We need those words printed in the air. It comes off like a terrible music video that somebody was allowed to go on for 2 hours with. This movie is so offensively over-directed it spills from the screen in every single scene. Somebody obviously told Boyle early on that the whole CCTV footage camera angle was a good idea because dear god does he go back to that well so often it gets to be baffling.
Whoever scored this, when he wasn't de-constructing "Born Slippy" into a ponderous, stripped out, car wreck of it's original form, decided that people no longer needed ears. Music blares into scenes abruptly and at full volume to the point you spend most of the movie fiddling with the volume. I don't know that I've ever seen a movie with worse musical choices. There is no club in the world where the entire place sings in perfect unison to "Radio Gaga". Literally as I write this more and more things come to mind of how awful it is. If you were any kind of fan of the book the part where Spud begins to write his "memoirs" which are instantly recognizable as the text of the novel is so cripplingly meta it will make you groan. More so with the whole "oh who'd ever read stories written by a nobody?" It doesn't work. On any level. Trainspotting is generally considered one of the finest novels of its genre for the last 25 years. This is akin to having the narrator in Fight Club sit there in odd scenes scribbling away and have Tyler Durden say "Hey what are you writing there?" and then have the narrator hurriedly hide his scattered pages away "oh, it's nothing...nothing". The only person who will think this is a good idea is somebody who never read the book or even knew the movie was a book in the first place.
Why was Veronika even in the move except to give a narrative bridge to move the plot from A to B to C? Why is she hanging around a bunch of middle aged junkies? The character felt wedged in to make the scenes somehow fit together. This was terrible. I don't say that lightly. I love the first movie, love the book, but this was absolutely awful. When it wasn't stroking itself frantically to how good it's predecessor was, it was making terrible decisions with its current iteration or just outright re-using material from it. In 2 hours I would honestly say 30 minute of it is either footage from or derived from material from the original. Kelly MacDonald presumably showed in this as some form of show of gratitude for giving a very respectable career its start but she wisely only has a cameo in this. The rest of the time the various acting abilities of the leads (McGregor, Bremner, Carlyle, Miller) are utterly wasted here by poor writing and even worse direction. Boyle seems more interesting in what he can do with the camera or what effect he can transpose on the screen than giving direction. McGregor tries in vain to pump life back into the "Choose Life" speech but the writing smacks of an out of touch 40 or 50 year old trying to re-hash something from a bygone era with painful references to social media. The original works because of its ability to draw on things that society expects you to want, that leads you to believe that you want but that you don't actually need. It's timeless because it applies to basic human emotion, regardless of the era. Their updated version of the speech sounds like some woeful soapbox rant about the inanity of the modern age. It's neither done well nor in a way that will age well. This was dreadful. Absolutely dreadful.
It has been a very long time since I saw a movie as **** as this one. The original is a masterpiece, a movie that will stand up as well in 20 years time as it does today, as it did upon release. It was a window into a world most of us didn't know. It was human, it was gritty. Well written, brilliantly directly, amazingly scored. This is the opposite on every single level.
Firstly the movie constantly calls back to it's predecessor and not even in subtle ways. When it isn't literally showing you clips of the first movie, it is having it's characters basically re-enact aspects of it. My breaking point was in a chase scene in the final third Mark gets thrown off a car and lands roughly in front of it. I said aloud "For Christs sake don't do the smile, please don't do the smile..." Brief pause and Ewan McGregor does the exact same grin and laugh from the shoplifting scene in the first. At that point I became fairly certain that they either weren't even trying/cashing in on the first or were just so smug they once made a great movie they couldn't help but remind you every chance they got. This isn't nostalgia, it is ****.
Boyle takes every conceivable chance he gets to thrown some pointless visual effect on the screen. Spud talks about forging signatures? We need some writing in the air. Two characters are babbling inanely? We need those words printed in the air. It comes off like a terrible music video that somebody was allowed to go on for 2 hours with. This movie is so offensively over-directed it spills from the screen in every single scene. Somebody obviously told Boyle early on that the whole CCTV footage camera angle was a good idea because dear god does he go back to that well so often it gets to be baffling.
Whoever scored this, when he wasn't de-constructing "Born Slippy" into a ponderous, stripped out, car wreck of it's original form, decided that people no longer needed ears. Music blares into scenes abruptly and at full volume to the point you spend most of the movie fiddling with the volume. I don't know that I've ever seen a movie with worse musical choices. There is no club in the world where the entire place sings in perfect unison to "Radio Gaga". Literally as I write this more and more things come to mind of how awful it is. If you were any kind of fan of the book the part where Spud begins to write his "memoirs" which are instantly recognizable as the text of the novel is so cripplingly meta it will make you groan. More so with the whole "oh who'd ever read stories written by a nobody?" It doesn't work. On any level. Trainspotting is generally considered one of the finest novels of its genre for the last 25 years. This is akin to having the narrator in Fight Club sit there in odd scenes scribbling away and have Tyler Durden say "Hey what are you writing there?" and then have the narrator hurriedly hide his scattered pages away "oh, it's nothing...nothing". The only person who will think this is a good idea is somebody who never read the book or even knew the movie was a book in the first place.
Why was Veronika even in the move except to give a narrative bridge to move the plot from A to B to C? Why is she hanging around a bunch of middle aged junkies? The character felt wedged in to make the scenes somehow fit together. This was terrible. I don't say that lightly. I love the first movie, love the book, but this was absolutely awful. When it wasn't stroking itself frantically to how good it's predecessor was, it was making terrible decisions with its current iteration or just outright re-using material from it. In 2 hours I would honestly say 30 minute of it is either footage from or derived from material from the original. Kelly MacDonald presumably showed in this as some form of show of gratitude for giving a very respectable career its start but she wisely only has a cameo in this. The rest of the time the various acting abilities of the leads (McGregor, Bremner, Carlyle, Miller) are utterly wasted here by poor writing and even worse direction. Boyle seems more interesting in what he can do with the camera or what effect he can transpose on the screen than giving direction. McGregor tries in vain to pump life back into the "Choose Life" speech but the writing smacks of an out of touch 40 or 50 year old trying to re-hash something from a bygone era with painful references to social media. The original works because of its ability to draw on things that society expects you to want, that leads you to believe that you want but that you don't actually need. It's timeless because it applies to basic human emotion, regardless of the era. Their updated version of the speech sounds like some woeful soapbox rant about the inanity of the modern age. It's neither done well nor in a way that will age well. This was dreadful. Absolutely dreadful.