10 Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia (And Won)

6. T2 Trainspotting

Danny Boyle's 21-years-in-the-making sequel to his monolithic black comedy Trainspotting is a devilishly clever rebuke to hollow nostalgia-bait follow-ups.

Though T2 Trainspotting is packed with tongue-in-cheek callbacks to the 1996 original, the film is more a critique of rose-tinted nostalgia than a box-ticking laundry list of references.

This is primarily realised through the film's character development, where the central quartet are generally shown to have done little to move on with their lives, and are more or less the same a**holes they were two decades prior.

At one point, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) even tellingly comments, "Nostalgia. That's why you're here. You're a tourist in your own youth."

And that's the film's real genius: it's still ludicrously entertaining to be reunited with these rascals once again, and some may even find their unchanging lives weirdly comforting, yet like the original it is absolutely framed as a cautionary tale.