Like the main character, I just don't care.

Rating: 7/10 (15 November 2009)

If a middle-aged man were to walk outside his house right now in a chicken suit and started attacking small children, a lot of people would say he lacks maturity. Or, perhaps, that he's a pervert. If he sustained his attack long enough, he'd be on the news, and the police would come, handcuff him, and laugh in the guy's face. Lack of maturity is something that is obviously negative in out society. What I find interesting, though, is: what is labeled as immaturity in real life is labeled as sublime quirkiness on the movie screen. Sometimes. Other times, in case of shows like The Wiggles, immaturity is labeled as stupid. Other times, in case of comedies, immaturity is labeled as hilarious. Other times, in case of books like Naked Lunch, immaturity is labeled as offensive. Other times, in case of movies like Trainspotting, immaturity is just generic, boring, and I've seen this so many times I know exactly what's going to happen in five minutes, oh look! I was right.
I'll just get right to my point. Trainspotting is one of the most unoriginal movies I've ever seen in my life. From the opening surrealist toilet scene (which was used in everything from video games to books to artwork to cartoons long before Trainspotting was even an idea in the writer's head) to the childish DRUGS ARE REALLY, REALLY BAD!!! ending and everything between those two points.
The nihilistic characters are trite and safe, copy/pasted from some MTV reality show that contains 2% reality and 98% what looks cool. Their generic nihilistic actions are so safe, most eight-year-old boys would think they're lame, but, for some reason, the middle-aged crowd calls them "intelligent". The entire drug-addiction plot line plays out exactly like it did in that DRUGS ARE REALLY, REALLY BAD!!! video you had to watch in high school health class.
My point? It takes a lot more to shock people than a couple kids playing around in a toilet. There is absolutely nothing disturbing here whatsoever. Why? Because this is the pansy crap we see every single anti-drug movie ever made. It's so unabashedly unoriginal, I fail to see how anyone can even call it art, being that the definition of art is "an original body or work" . . .
The cinematography is generic, and is only even slightly inspired when it rips-off Kubrick. The acting is generic, being that I don't think it's hard for a young twenty-something to act as a young twenty-something. I don't even know why they even bothered giving the characters names, because they completely lack any sort of identity that real people have. The only identity they have is that, they're boring, flat, copy/paste characters who are addicted to heroin . . . and they do heroin . . . yeah. And even if people say this lack of identity originality is the point of the movie—which it's not—then I'll say back, Brent Easton Ellis' novel Less Than Zero did that exact thing ten years before this movie came out and seven years before Welsh's book came out, and it did it infinitely better and more realistically than either one.
If you liked Trainspotting, I pity you.
2/10