The native visual wit of Danny Boyle's direction has only grown more delightful with age—he revels in mischievous references to the original film. And there's something undeniably satisfying in seeing the four actors from the original reunited, and looking weathered. (It's also nice to hear Ewan McGregor speaking with a Scots accent again.) The original film was like a bone-marrow biopsy of the zeitgeist of its period. By contrast, the sequel revels in pricking its characters' articulate, self-aware out-of-timeness. It confines them to a Scotland that is simultaneously collapsing upon itself (high mountains of garbage loom everywhere) and exploding outward into an indistinguishable Europeanness, and it surrounds them with reminders of the selves they never managed to become.

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