A Clockwork Orange

"The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence. "

Title: A Clockwork Orange
Year of Release: 1971
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Genre: Drama/Crime/Thriller
Rating: 7.5/10

Set in (at the time) the future, the film follows Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell), who is a hoodlum criminal who commits some terrible crimes, goes to jail and then volunteers for an experimental test therapy to make him "cured" of wanting to commit a crime.

The acting from Malcolm McDowell is generally spot on, but I felt a lot of the rest of the cast were mediocre actors. Particularly Alex's "Drooges", I'm not sure which one it was, but the entire time he was apart of the film he would just sit there and giggle, and it really felt to me quite forced so it bothered me, but I could get past that. But at later parts the same actor was mediocre, who just seemed to be read lines and giggle like a little school girl. It wasn't just him, though which I felt wasn't too great in the acting aspect, some of the other people let down, though it was generally minor things, when they gather, its more clustered.

Whenever I read about this film, people always talk about how "graphic" they though this film was, or how disgusted they were about all the nudity, and sexuality everywhere. There is undoubtedly quite a lot of those things, for example, a lot of nude art, rape, sex and nudity, even a penis shaped ice block. Though people may see this as perverted and exploitive, I see it as very necessary, without it being this "graphic" it would not be at all disturbing in any sort of aspect, it would just be "Oh, rape.. interesting.". It also feels like it's an intention to show that the times have changed from the older days, and now the world has become quite a different one, so by emphasizing on that aspect you get a grasp of that intention. With that all said, I don't think it is that graphic, it's not like you will want to cover your eyes or look away, but it's enough to get the point across, and it's the content that is what "does it".

From the opening scene right until the end, this is quite obviously a different and stylised film. Though that's not an entirely bad thing, just at times, it felt to me Kubrick was trying too hard to stylise it. But a lot of it is very interesting and great, but again, as I said, just it clusters a bit and begins to become a bit over the top, defeating the point, or the intention. Now this may be contributed to the novel, and Kubrick was just trying to keep faithful in every detail, but since I haven't read the novel, I won't go there.

The film really stresses over certain aspects of psychology, that one must be able to choose to remain "human". It is quite affective throughout, using the "Ludovico technique", which is where they forcibly keep your eyes open and make you view disturbing videos, while your on some sort of drug which makes you feel like your dying, or makes you want to die, to some extent, thus making you not want to commit crimes, etc. Despite building this up quite a lot, I felt that in the end, they didn't go too far with it, I'm not saying the ending was "bad", but they could have done more, or thats how I felt.

Despite my criticisms of this film, I still enjoyed it, and it is still a good film, but it does have it's fair share of mediocrities, which seem to be less talked about when it comes to this film in particular. I haven't thought long and hard about this film, but I did try talk about as much as I could.

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