T2 Trainspotting is sadder, more poignant, I think. Definitely darker. Middle-aged, and now despairing over a life that really amounted to nothing at all, T2 is a meditation of sorts for the middle-aged rebels. Instead of youthful exuberance, you see weariness, regrets, pain, and the thinness of life gone awry. Instead of braggadocio, you see bitter defeat and hopelessness in a world that is no longer their own. Renton, Spud, Begbie and Sickboy were all trapped in their past, and now, 20 years have passed. They look back at what they had, and what was present.
"'Choose life'. 'Choose life' was a well meaning slogan from a 1980's anti-drug campaign and we used to add things to it, so I might say for example, choose... designer lingerie, in the vain hope of kicking some life back into a dead relationship. Choose handbags, choose high-heeled shoes, cashmere and silk, to make yourself feel what passes for happy...Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand others ways to spew your bile across people you've never met. Choose updating your profile, tell the world what you had for breakfast and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, desperate to believe that you don't look as bad as they do...human interaction reduced to nothing more than data...Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you'd done it all differently. Choose never learning from your own mistakes. Choose watching history repeat itself. Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get, rather than what you always hoped for. Settle for less and keep a brave face on it. Choose disappointment and choose losing the ones you love, then as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you can see that one day in the future, piece by piece, they will all be gone and there'll be nothing left of you to call alive or dead. Choose your future, Veronika. Choose life."" Mark Renton, T2 Trainspotting
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