Greatest film ever

Rating: 10/10 (20 July 2005)

This is a beautiful, beautiful film. It shows how humans behave in the real world and doesn't compromise one inch of truth in doing this. It tells the story of a young man who's daily way of life involves gang warfare, drugs, rape, and listening to Beethoven. The central character, Alex, doesn't see himself as bad. However the society around him thinks otherwise and he eventually gets caught and locked up for his crimes.
He's sentenced to 14 years in prison for "the accidental killing of a person" and one day a government minister visits the prison in order to look for a suitable candidate for a new experimental form of treatment which is supposed to stop a criminal from committing crimes and turn him into a functional member of society.
Because of his outgoing personality, and the fact that he's still a vicious young hoodlum at heart, Alex is the one who they pick as the guinea-pig for this new therapy.
After undergoing 2 weeks of being strapped to a chair and forced to watch movies of rape and violence whilst having a paralysing serum injected into his body and his eyes kept permanently open thanks to a set of "lid-locks", our hero is transformed out of all recognition.
Now a mentally crippled member of society who is free to roam the streets again, the people he terrorized in the past come back to take their revenge on him. Helpless, homeless, and unable to listen to the music he loves without getting sick, Alex decides to take the ultimate step and end his own life.
However, although badly bruised and with many bones broken, he survives the jump out of a third-storey window, and as he lies in hospital physically recovering, he is also recovering mentally from the "treatment" and is starting to once again feel twitches of desire for the old "Ultra-Violence" and we see him become happier and stronger. At the last moment in the movie we see a strange look on his face as he revels in Beethoven's 9th symphony while having a fantasy about having sex with a woman while people stand around and applaud him, We know and he knows he's cured.
That brief summary doesn't do justice to the movie, or the book for that matter. Once you see "A Clockwork Orange" you'll never look at life the same way again. See it a few times and it becomes part of you. It shows you the intangible things everybody in the world spends most of their time talking about, but nobody can explain. It shows you what people mean when they say they "made it" in life, It shows you why people that don't show fear ultimately don't get picked on, regardless of physical size, about why honesty about one's vices will always lead to you being hailed as a hero, regardless of how despicable those vices are.