Boris Lonic

A Clockwork Orange is a great movie because there is a lot of irony in it. It's like "the tables being turned" and "the shoe being on the other foot." It puts the former perpetrator, Alex De Large in the place of his former victims, who are out for their revenge against him for crimes he committed against them in the past. Alex, portrayed brilliantly by the highly talented actor Malcolm McDowell, is a charismatic & intelligent, but very brutal gang leader. Along with his "droogs" Alex beats, pillages, steals, rapes and kills like an immoral punk with no conscience. Things turn sour very quickly however and there is dissension in the ranks because of Alex's brutality towards Pete, Georgie Boy and Dim, his weak followers. They tell him about a house owned by a Cat Lady, where there could potentially be a lot of valuables to steal. Alex breaks into the house by himself and after a nasty altercation with the woman, he ends up killing her. When Alex hears a police siren, he tries to flee from the crime scene, but Dim hits him in the head with a milk bottle, temporarily blinding him. The three of them abandon Alex and leave him laying there to be arrested by the police in retaliation for being assaulted by him. In prison, he hears about a program that deconditions the urge to commit physical and serxual violence. Alex is forced to watch disturbing images on a film screen multiple times while his eyes are pried open and he is strapped in a straight jacket. He feels increasingly sick at what he has seen and becomes "cured." He becomes a "Clockwork Orange", healthy and organic on the outside, but unhealthy and articial on the inside due to a reflex mechanism beyond his control. After he is released from prison, Alex is defenseless against an old homeless man he assaulted and his former partners in crime Georgie Boy & Dim are now ironically, on the opposite side of the law. They drive Alex to a forest where they attempt to drown him in a water trough while beating him up. His parents have turned against him and he is a young man without a home. Alex stumbles across a house called "HOME." The owner is another familiar face to Alex, another one of his former victims out for revenge. The moral of the story is not just that what goes around comes around, but that sometimes the so called "victims" are just as evil as the perpetrator. This is a great morality play with plenty of irony in it. A film definitely worth seeing.