Smart, funny, sickly and sometimes just plain unconscious, Mark Renton is a hero for our times. Set in the underbelly of Edinburgh, TRAINSPOTTING is the story of Mark and his so-called friends – a bunch of losers, liars, psychos, thieves and junkies. Hilarious but harrowing, the film charts the disintegration of their friendship as they proceed, seemingly inevitably, towards self-destruction. Mark alone has the insight and opportunity to escape his fate – but then again, does he really want to ‘choose life’?
Restoration Credit:
Supervised and approved by director Danny Boyle, this 4K digital restoration was undertaken by the Criterion Collection from a scan of the 35mm original negative. The 5.1 surround soundtrack was remastered from the original six-track magnetic masters by Ted Hall at Pacific Ocean Post in Santa Monica, California.
“Exuberant and pitiless, profane yet eloquent, flush with the ability to create laughter out of unspeakable situations, TRAINSPOTTING is a drop-dead look at a dead-end lifestyle that has all the strength of its considerable contradictions.” —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
“In TRAINSPOTTING, Danny Boyle works in a fever-dream style derived, in equal measure, from the street operas of Martin Scorsese and the adrenaline aesthetic of music videos…. Like Scorsese and Tarantino, Boyle uses pop songs as rhapsodic mood enhancers, though in his own ravey-hypnotic style.” —Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (1996)
