The influence of director Danny Boyle on the sequel to his groundbreaking original is all over the film; not just the narrative, but the long and winding road toward its completion. It can be fairly assumed that without Boyle helming the picture, it would almost certainly have never been made. And Boyle himself was adamant that without the return of the original movie’s stars, he was not interesting in making the film at all. he electricity which the original produced made it inevitable almost immediately that a sequel would one day be made. And, indeed, the author of the novel, Irvine Welsh, beat the filmmakers to the punch because of the delay. Welsh published a sequel to his novel, titled Porno, in 2006. The film sequel would still be another decade away.
Boyle’s kinetic direction of Trainspotting and his subsequent Academy Award win for Best Director for Slumdog Millionaire only put extra pressure on the team to come up with a story they felt would honor the original without merely passing over the same material once again. Boyle almost immediately rejected the idea of Welsh’s novel becoming the film sequel in addition to the literary sequel. Nevertheless, during production, the tentative title was, indeed, Porno. The finished product, however, contains very little of Welsh’s source material. Boyle instead chose to wield his influence by inserting certain elements of Porno along with material from the original novel not used in the original film into a mostly original screenplay.
Because such a long gap separated Trainspotting from Trainspotting 2 and because everyone involved wanting to make a follow-up that kept the basic underlying personalities of the main characters, Boyle’s decision makes great sense. One of the problems with trying to make a sequel to a film based on a sequel to the novel from which it was adapted is that it only the rarest of circumstances is the literary material translated intact into the cinematic result. Ultimately, Trainspotting 2 is a sequel to Boyle’s film and not Welsh’s novel and so making the sequel based heavily upon Porno would be akin to making a big-screen, Technicolor sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind based on the sequel written to the novel by a completely different writer half a century later. It might be a sequel in name, but perhaps not so much a sequel in spirit.
After multiple attempts to find a script suitable to all involved as well as a much-publicized healing of the feud which erupted between star Ewan McGregor and the director, eventually what Boyle gave fans of the original is something that feels absolutely spot-on. Nevertheless, because the original film is so beloved, audiences and critics alike were most lukewarm upon its release. That reaction is surprisingly simple to explain, however.
The excitement of the original is all about the optimistic possibilities of choice as expressed in the “Choose Life” monologue. Trainspotting 2, by contrast, is all about the onset of middle-age and looking back at the negative consequences today of the choices one made earlier. That Danny Boyle--at age 61--had already lived through the period of life in which he situates the characters is purely coincidental. Maybe.
