TRAINSPOTTING 4K Review: Still Lusty After All These Years

Home theatre nerd that I am, I do love it when the Criterion Collection calls in its old laserdisc releases and puts them out in the modern label. Danny Boyle's 1996 culture bomb, Trainspotting, was immediately ported to the Collection as one of those unwieldy silver platters, back in 1997; now, twenty-seven years later (!), it re-joins the group as spine #1204.

For one thing, it's a chance to get some of that archival material back -- not only is the original laserdisc commentary track included here, but so are the wild takes of Ewan McGregor recording the commentary's introduction, from back in the days when such tracks were novel enough to require them!

Nostalgia is a big part of the overall draw here, for me anyway. Trainspotting went off like a warhead in my first year of film school, following Pulp Fiction as one of the Miramax films that more or less defined '90s indie cinema for my generation.

(Further nostalgic note from this pedant: Criterion's release, of course, preserves the true, filmmakers' version of Trainspotting, per their mission; but I do wish they'd slipped the American audio track onto the disc somewhere, if for nothing other than completeness' sake, and the fact that our side of the pond got really used to those line deliveries in the years before the proper version arrived on DVD!)

Arriving in bright, plastic-free packaging -- which I hope will be not just the line-wide path for Criterion going forward, but an overdue manufacturing change for the entire home video industry -- Trainspotting has lost none of its spark. Watching the film again (for probably the thirtieth time) for this review, it felt fresh as a daisy, while still hitting like a cinder block to the jaw.

Trainspotting's impact in the UK upon its release in 1996 was so seismic that its legend preceded it onto North American shores. Convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein wanted to market the film as the "European Pulp Fiction," and by the time advance screenings were happening in Toronto to sold-out crowds, Boyle's sophomore feature had become the "get" in that year's film-going.

It was one of those films whose all-points carpet-bombing of cinema culture -- zeitgeisty theatrical run; chart-topping soundtrack album; iconic and instantly identifiable branding via those black and white photos of the principal cast -- was a given for the tastemaker films of the nineties, but has only been matched intermittently since (although Barbie certainly went for it in 2023).

The Criterion package's cardboard gatefold opens to reveal two discs, cheekily labeled "choose 4K" and "choose blu-ray," which is my kind of stupid joke. I chose 4K, on Mark Renton's proverbial "big television set," because (first-act) Renton would call me a wanker. (Third-act Mark Renton probably has an equally large one.)

The original 35mm camera negative was scanned for this 4K version, and that, plus the high dynamic range grading via Dolby Vision, plus the explosive Iggy Pop track as Mark and Spud tear ass across Edinburgh in the film's legendary opening sequence, mean that this presentation of Trainspotting grabs you by the face and doesn't let you go for all 94 of its minutes. (Quite literally: I watched all of the credits, as I cooled off from the high.)

The narrative, stalwartly bricked together by screenwriter John Hodge from Irvine Welsh's more elliptical novel, unfolds in three precise half-hour chunks. Act one introduces young Mark Renton (an emaciated, never-better McGregor) and his idiot friends. The latter are a murderers' row of stars-in-the-making, including Ewen Bremner as Spud, Jonny Lee Miller as Sick Boy, Kelly MacDonald as Diane, and Robert Carlyle as the sociopath Begbie.

Renton's hooked on heroin; he decides to get off it, and proceeds to experience a return to "normal life," which includes sleeping with a schoolgirl, watching his buddy's VHS sex tapes, and toilet-diving for opium suppositories.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then -- in the midst of a dull hike across the Scottish highlands for which, Renton realizes, he is simply not high enough -- act two sees the characters get back on drugs, chasing the high all the way to the bottom of the barrel. And the bottom, indeed, arrives: a dead baby, a heroin overdose, a near-miss with both jail time and the ballooning AIDS epidemic, and a cold-turkey withdrawal under his parents' supervision are Renton's rewards after he and his friends decide to "keep going and fuck everything."

In act three, Renton escapes his Edinburgh doldrums, or tries to. Fleeing to London, he makes an attempt at getting a real life -- kinda -- until Begbie and Sick Boy show up and ruin everything. A low-scale drug deal offers Mark the chance to break even further away, if he can first confront all the pieces of his old life: the junk, the dead friends, and the quartet of amoral accomplices who would take it all away from him if he doesn't take it away from them first.

The jacket essay by critic Graham Fuller notes that by the end of the film, Renton has left his transgressive days -- which, even built around heroin abuse, are a kind of freedom from the oppressive social reality of the United Kingdom in the post-Thatcher '80s -- behind him, and has become the exact thing he is lampooning (or claiming to lampoon) in the "Choose Life" speech. When Renton disappears into blurry obscurity in the film's final shot, it's because he's become just like everyone else, a happy-face caricature of what people are supposed to be like.

Fair point, but I always pay particular attention to a warmer, more relatable throughline of Renton's story in the third act: he recognizes that if he doesn't ditch his toxic circle of contemporaries, he's going to be hampered by them for the rest of his life. "He's our friend, so what are you gonna do," is a frequent refrain in the film regarding staying acquiescent to Begbie's violent excesses, which boil over to such a fever pitch following the drug deal that poor Spud and a random pub-goer are left bleeding on the floor. Renton doesn't choose modern conformity so much as "not this," and as he blurs away in the final sequence having ripped off his "so-called mates," I can't help but feel he may have grasped for an unfair freedom, but nonetheless achieved it by any means necessary.

I reviewed Criterion's The Last Picture Show for Screen Anarchy last year, and part of me wishes the label had repeated their move there (in which they included the film's lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequel, Texasville, which continues the characters' stories twenty years later) by folding T2: Trainspotting into this release's supplemental materials.

T2 is another lesser sequel to a lightning-in-a-bottle original, but slamming the latter film into the player right after finishing the first one would have been a wild capper on my return trip to early-'90s Edinburgh.