A Clockwork Orange

Based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange is ranked as the 70th best movie of all time. The movie follows the life of Alex, a young man living in a future totalitarian England. He starts out as a teenage criminal and the opening scenes of the movie are disturbing and horrifying. Along with his friends, Alex beats up a homeless man, and another group of teenagers. He breaks into a writer's house, rapes his wife and cripples the writer. He only gets caught when he breaks into a cat woman's house because his friends smash him with a milk bottle as the police arrive. The cat woman ends up dying because of her injuries. The interesting part of the movie happens after all of these scenes. Alex is sentenced to 14 years in prison; however, he is given the opportunity to be a free man if he participates in the governments' "experiment." This experiment involves shots and then watching movies to condition him to get horribly sick at the thought of violence. His body physically repels violence. As a side effect, he is also conditioned against one of his favorite composer's pieces: Beethoven's 9th Symphony. After getting let out, he goes back to his house only to find out his parents have replaced him with a better "son." He then meets the homeless man again who, with his friends, starts to beat up Alex. Then the police arrive to break it up, but the police are actually two of Alex's former friends and they beat him and try to drown him. He finds refuge in the house of the writer he attacked, and the writer finds out Alex was the attacker when Alex is in the tub singing, "I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain!" because that is the song that he was singing when they broke in. Then in order to hurt the public view of the government, they lock Alex in a room while blasting the 9th Symphony until he jumps out a window and tries to kill himself. He wakes up in a hospital with casts on almost every limb on his body, and throughout the next few scenes he gets cured. The final scene is of Alex's imagination- he imagines two naked women wrestling on the ground in front of his bed, and as the scene ends, you hear him say, "I was cured, all right."

This movie asked a lot of questions. What is evil? And can you ever take that evil out of someone? Even though Alex's actions can be considered evil, you end up sympathizing with him as he suffers and suffers. They try and take the evil out, but in the end, he is exactly the same as he was before- only with more broken limbs.

While I think this was a great film, you need to watch it with subtitles. There are a lot of made up words in their speech, that can be almost impossible to understand. They use words like yarblockos and yarbles and without the subtitles it sounds like another language.

A Clockwork Orange definitely earns its spot on the AFI list. If you can get past the absurdity and crazy language, this movie is a fantastic film- both entertaining and thought provoking. A must-see!