Choreographing movement is everything.

Rating: 8/10 (23 April 2020)

If you've seen most of Kubrick's films, you'll understand the emphasis on diagramming - actors, objects, and the spaces in between. It's a strong reason to want to watch a film. Especially if it's a film as messy, sadistic, and verbally vague like A Clockwork Orange. Based on Anthony Burgess's book, the film started off as being a dystopian horror but soon transformed itself into a glorified drama.
The film's motive is simple. It is to present to you the life of people without the immediate effects of law and order. And by those virtues, it portrays distasteful and offensive acts that the world (perhaps inevitably?) would carry forward. The story is about Alex, a hedonistic, sadistic, and young man, who spends his nights listening to Beethoven's 9th, and his days frolicking. He's violent, a rapist, and a sex addict. If you're wondering if there's any hidden philosophical purpose to the story, there isn't. But that's not to say there isn't a psychological one.
Stanley Kubrick composed the film's frames imagining how one would a contradictory and conflicted world. He dehumanized Alex to the point of insanity. It's focused - it's not clear why Alex is but his existence is seen and purported as an object. The scene where they're all walking in a tight circle in prison externalizes this aspect. It compresses their crime as striking not a moral nerve but only a bureaucratic one. One that serves a society; someone we raise to the stand to desensitize and terrorize the masses.
The film has no telling, instrumental moment. It's harsh and radical. That some things never change. That's the moral of the story. Only Stanley Kubrick presents it in a way that it is bound to confuse you. With the help of religion and psychiatry, the film is long and psychopathic. You're not supposed to feel something for Alex - even though it's his life you plunge into all throughout the film. And for me, that's a tough thing to achieve. To present a character for the length of 140 minutes and not give away any emotion to the audience (that is you) to take home or sit with.