Hyped!

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 2011)

McGregor's all-time best performance and Boyle's most hyped movie. Trainspotting precisely captures the spirit of the age through tracing the lives of four heroin-addicted Scottish friends, depicting their ups and downs, and their struggle to come clean and start a new life. The movie is highly graphic and quite shocking I have to say, but this somehow corresponds with the gravity of the experience itself that Boyle has brilliantly and vividly conveyed to the audience in fluttering stages: the absence, the denial, the realization, the struggle, the relapse... etc. The film doesn't lecture or blame; it doesn't treat drug use as an individual case but as a societal phenomena that has everything to do with the atmosphere back then. Besides McGregor's, Robert Carlyle's role as Begbie was remarkable as applause-worthy as usual.