A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Tarantino is famous for his quote on violence in films as being “so much fun” and Michael Haneke made Funny Games as a comment on why we tend to like violence in movies. I don’t think that was the main point Kubrick was making with this film, but that was my initial thoughts with the first half here. Sex and violence is definitely not fun when it is done like this.
This film explores several interesting topics on crime and punishment, re-socialization and free will. Like with Lolita I really appreciated how Kubrick doesn’t force the viewer to take a specific viewpoint, but just lets us sit alone with all the horrible stuff that happens on screen and take it from there. While I could see what themes the film is going for, it just didn’t evoke a whole lot of thoughts for me. It is hard to have any sort of sympathy for Alex. Not that a film needs sympathetic characters, but we do spend most of the film with them and he mostly remains a token character for a senseless violent psychopath. Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing deals more directly with the death penalty, but has a similar setup with just showing a blank slate of a character doing horrible acts and then lets the viewer indulge in the consequences created by society afterwards. Kieslowski didn’t gave the killer any sympathetic characteristics but it made me reflect on the whole process of justice created by state. With A Clockwork Orange I was left mostly indifferent to the whole thing, even though I admired how Kubrick tells this story in this bizarre future world.
This movie is also more than 50 years old and I think its legacy has a bigger impact than the actual movie for me. Like the White Christmas episode of Black Mirror that deals with a similar premise of using technology as a way to punish and “correct” criminals.
Rating: 3.5