Trainspotting (1996) movie poster

Trainspotting (1996)

"Choose life."
ThumbScore
👍 92%Google users liked it ⓘ
Critics Score
🎬 86%
DramaCrime

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Director
Runtime
1h 34m
Rated
R
Country
United Kingdom
Language
English
TMDB Rating
8.0/10 (10,275 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes
90%
Metacritic
83

Cast

Ewan McGregor as Renton · 72% avg
Ewen Bremner as Spud · 74% avg
Jonny Lee Miller as Sick Boy · 72% avg
Kevin McKidd as Tommy · 75% avg
Robert Carlyle as Begbie · 74% avg
Kelly Macdonald as Diane · 71% avg
Peter Mullan as Swanney · 74% avg
James Cosmo as Renton's Father · 67% avg

Is Trainspotting good?

Yes. 92% of real audiences liked it, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 86%.

Where it ranks on ThumbScore

Rank in its genre
#57 / 3335 · Drama
Rank in its year
#1 / 92 · 1996
Rank among its director's films
#2 / 12 · Danny Boyle
On ThumbScore's lists

By audience score, among films with 500 or more votes.

Overview

Heroin addict Mark Renton stumbles through bad ideas and sobriety attempts with his unreliable friends --Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Tommy. He also has an underage girlfriend, Diane, along for the ride. After cleaning up and moving from Edinburgh to London, Mark finds he can't escape the life he left behind as Begbie and Sick Boy come knocking. Wikipedia ↗

About the Film

Trainspotting is a 1996 British dark comedy drama directed by Danny Boyle, based on Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel. Ewan McGregor stars as Mark Renton, a young heroin addict in Edinburgh who oscillates between attempts to get clean and the gravitational pull of addiction and his circle of dysfunctional friends — the psychopathic Begbie, the hapless Spud, the scheming Sick Boy, and the tragic Tommy. Danny Boyle's kinetic directorial style transformed Welsh's darkly comic novel into a visually inventive, high-energy film that was simultaneously horrifying and exhilarating.

The opening "Choose life" monologue, delivered in voiceover as Renton sprints through Edinburgh's streets, became one of the most quoted and culturally significant passages in 1990s cinema — a blistering takedown of consumer culture that paradoxically became an advertising slogan. Boyle used surreal visual techniques — Renton diving into a filthy toilet that becomes an underwater paradise, a baby crawling across a ceiling during a withdrawal nightmare — to externalize the distorted psychology of addiction without glamorizing it. The soundtrack, featuring Iggy Pop, Underworld, Blur, and New Order, captured the convergence of drug culture and Britpop that defined mid-1990s British youth.

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What Reddit Thinks

r/movies
⬆ 30,229💬 2,218 comments
'Trainspotting' at 25: How an Indie Film About Heroin Became a Feel-Good Classic
Top comment: "I don't understand how anyone can call this movie "feel-good". It's a movie that generally leaves..."
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