Good movie -- as a result of the brilliant source material

Rating: 7/10 (31 July 2012)

The first time that I watched A Clockwork Orange as an adult old enough to understand it, I really loved it. Then I read the book, and I loved the movie a little bit less. It is a great movie when it follows the source material, but the Kubrick-i-zation of A Clockwork Orange makes it merely good. This is because Kubrick adds all kinds of ridiculous style to the movie, as well as the occasional bad joke. It's worth a watch, and the humor mostly works. However, it's not the masterpiece that Kubrick's thralls insist it is.
A Clockwork Orange covers a lot of themes. Mostly, it deals with modern society's utter ineptitude when it comes to managing and eliminating violent crime. Society tries brutal punishment while psychoanalyzing psychopaths. Nothing seems to work. Both of these extremes are shown in a darkly humorous manner in A Clockwork Orange. Although it is a "comedy", there isn't any point in A Clockwork Orange that is laugh-out-loud funny. The humor comes from the absurdity of it all. A Clockwork Orange has the same sense of humor as Dr. Strangelove -- portraying everyone as either evil, dogmatic, or stupid, interested only in themselves, and not humanity as a whole. The politicians and cops in A Clockwork Orange don't care about finding real solutions that make society better. They care only about applying band-aids, and phony solutions that look good. Like Dr. Strangelove, the story feels like a great big sick joke, but with a strong message behind it.
Malcolm McDowell does give a great performance as Alex, the "humble narrator". Alex is a total sociopath, and he narrates the violent events of the story with a stoic indifference. When the violent tables get turned on him in the movie, McDowell perfectly plays the phony victim that Alex becomes. The one problem that I have with McDowell though is that he is too old for the part, but perhaps that was inevitable since a more faithful portrayal would have been too disturbing for the studio. Unfortunately, McDowell gives the only real good performance in this movie.
My biggest problem with this movie is with some of the absurdities that Kubrick introduced. For starters, the style throughout the movie is absolutely ludicrous. Old sci-fi movies about "the future" are notorious for having a bad sense of fashion, but this movie really takes the cake. In A Clockwork Orange, "the future" looks like somebody's gaudiest '70s nightmare taken to an extreme. Interiors of houses are full of blindingly bright colors and crazy artwork. Every other woman has brightly colored hair. Alex and his droogs wear tight white clothing with derby hats. Maybe in the early '70s this looked edgy. Now, it looks stupid.
Another problem with the movie is that it was just too far ahead of its time. It isn't Kubrick's fault -- it is just the reality of making a movie based on an incredibly violent and sexual book. Even now, in 2012, the public would have a hard time accepting a perfectly faithful translation of Anthony Burgess's masterpiece. But because of this, a lot of the content falls flat. For instance, a scene in the book where Alex rapes a couple of young girls becomes a scene in the movie where Alex has consensual sex with a couple of women. The book scene illustrates what a horrible monster Alex is. The movie scene is just pointless soft core porn. (No I don't think that the movie should have portrayed that scene faithfully -- it should have just been left out). I am probably one of the few people on Earth who thinks that the movie isn't disturbing enough and, the violence, not visceral enough. If you think that I am crazy, watch the Goodfellas scene where Joe Pesci stabs the guy in the trunk of the car. In the 40 years since ACO was made, it is startling how much more realistic movie violence has become.
I still own the movie, and this is one that I can definitely recommend. To me, the book is a 10, and the movie translation is a 7. Given how horrible the majority of book-to-movie translations are, I'd consider that a win. With that said, I think that this movie, more than any other, would benefit tremendously from a remake.