I'm one of those who believes that bringing back to life franchises and movies that succeeded in the past is not always a good idea, because many times the new adaptations are so bad that they stain the original movies. That's why to talk about T2 I'll try to leave out the nostalgia and the belonging that left us the first movie.

T2 is a film that from the first scenes wants to pay tribute to the first film of 20 years ago and relies heavily on references to the T1, not only for what it does to the plot itself, but also as repeated, unnecessary and abusive flashbacks.

But nothing is what it was. It's been 20 years of that movie, but it's also been 20 years for all of us who saw it. Perhaps for those who didn't live Trainspotting in their effervescent and brand-new adolescence, T2 will be interesting, but for all of us who feel it and enjoy it, we still have a feeling of disappointment that only with the passage of time, perhaps, can we overcome.

T2 is developed under the same bases of the first film, that is to say with the same director and its same protagonists and even resorting, as in the first installment, to a story of losers, betrayals and lives with no future for any of the protagonists, the movie doesn't achieve the same results.

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The film focuses much less on drugs, yes, it emphasizes several times the fact of being hooked, of dependence on heroin, but when we could see this before in almost all the characters, now it is only Spud who continues to suffer such addiction, although the others are still hooked on other things. In a certain way this film follows a little beyond the story of this group of friends who still had things to solve, things that at times give us good moments full of emotion, but also bizarre moments that seem taken from a festival of cliches.

There are interesting dialogues, funny situations, correct interpretations and a remarkable soundtrack. But something does not fit together and this excess of nostalgia for T1 only empties T2's plot of content.

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The performances, the cast and the atmosphere are still great, after all they have used the same elements of the first movie, only this time they do not transmit the same as the first one. They have changed, but we have also changed. Perhaps the idealisation of Trainspotting that we, the teenagers of that time, now in our forties, carry with us, takes away our objectivity when analysing and evaluating the film, but it is impossible not to compare one film with another when the first one will go down in history as one of the films of our life.

In T2, confusion predominates and the film plays with the classic situational entanglement, as effective as one is willing to participate. Each situation is detonated by the previous one where many times the plot goes out of the way to the point of letting us wonder if the story was badly armed or if they wanted the chaos to make it as it is. The film takes us on a journey of strange situations to perhaps take us down the path of reflection, where in the end we would find a kind of moral if there was a reason to cheer up.

However, what stands out in T2 is the consistency, the characters have not changed their way of being and the scenes are represented almost in the same way as the first film, but once again it is noticeable that the clocks no longer mark the proper time and the fetishes are excessively expensive making us even question whether it really is the same director of the first.

Conclusion.

It's a great film, yes, but as much as the original? No, absolutely no. It's a walk through nostalgia, through the youth of characters who grow old and don't want time to slip through their fingers, a time that heals, that hurts, that leaves open wounds that may not close. The soundtrack, so important in the original sounds here as sad and muted resonances losing the grace and aggressiveness that gave to the original film.

The film hurts and likes equally, and if you want to know what has been of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Franco Begbie you can not miss it, you will feel rewarded, grateful and sad at the same time.

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My Score: 6,8/10

• Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/180863-t2-trainspotting?language=en-US
• Critic: AA