Practically a parody

Rating: 3/10 (6 May 2009)

"A Clockwork Orange" is my favorite novel of all time. Before watching the movie I wondered if it would do justice to the novel. Well, it didn't. The movie was basically a porno version of the novel. Kubrick's aim seems to have been to take a philosophically meaningful story and incorporate as much female nudity into it as possible. Why? I guess it was avant-garde or something. I think there were a couple occasions on which bare "groodies" were possibly warranted. Other than that, the nudity was over-the-top and cheesy.
People talk about how disturbing the violence is in "A Clockwork Orange." Disturbing violence? I really didn't see any. What did masquerade as violence reminded me of the old "Tom and Jerry" show. Most of the violence consisted of Alex and his droogs tapping each other and their victims with canes, but the bizarre sound effects during these scenes told the viewer to see this as brutal. In another scene Alex raises a phallic sculpture in order to clobber a crazy cat-lady, but you don't actually see him hitting her with it; instead, you are shown something that looks a bit like cartoon fireworks. Then the rape scenes are always accompanied by upbeat music which just makes them seem comical. The violence in the book was truly disturbing, but I don't see how you are supposed to take violence in this movie seriously.
The book had a theme, which was that a person's most important right is being able to think and choose for himself, and nobody has the right to take that away from him regardless of the consequences. In its truly ridiculous final scene, the movie obliterated that theme by choosing to focus on and glorify Alex's sexual fantasies, as if he was some sort of perverted superhero. Thus the point the movie inadvertently seems to end up making is that if the government doesn't stop people, they will just go out and perform deviant acts, but deviance is so much fun that the government shouldn't try to stop them. This completely undermines the message of the book.
In short, the novel is a literary masterpiece. The movie is a hypersexualized, cartoonish version of that masterpiece, practically a parody. Good thing Kubrick didn't try a film version of "Pride and Prejudice"--wonder how that would have turned out. There are numerous things I hate about this movie, from the glow-in-the-dark jumpsuits to the fact that I will never be able to listen to the William Tell overture the same way again. But it had a few good points. It did follow the basic storyline of the book up until the end and was well acted and filmed. For that I will generously give it a 3.