Up with Dr. Strangelove

Rating: 10/10 (28 July 1999)

Oh, what a great flick this is! Confrontational, ultraviolent, a stark realisation of how Burgess envisaged the future - random violence, liberalism gone hard, your choices made for you, the parent as the child. Is Alex the man-child that was last seen staring at you in the last 2 minutes of 2001? If so, we've definitely taken a step backwards, the dusk of man as rational being. The treatment (which, I've heard, damaged McDowell's cornea) is scary - my girlfriend couldn't watch. The music intertwines beautifully with it all, and the attempted suicide scene makes you feel the crunch of bone on ground. The ending also makes you think: has he changed at all? Is he still the choiceless fool rendered a vegetable by the Ludovico treatment? Where does society go from here? This is, along with Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick's best.