Film review: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Not one of my favourites by Kubrick, but still interesting. Based on Anthony Burgess’ futuristic dystopian novel from 1959. Some spoilers here, the review is intended for people who have already watched the film.

I thought to myself that maybe Kubrick had gone too far with the violence. Some have criticized the film for glorifying violence, which is almost balletic with background music by Beethoven.

The story shows the consequences of violent acts. Alex clashes with some authority figures in the story, who seem as bad as he is. But this does not excuse Alex for his bad behaviour. Alex sees his violence as a kind of artistic project. According to page 186 in the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, the director reveals that he wanted to show “Alex’s guiltless sense of freedom to kill and rape and to be our savage natural selves”

The film is no doubt a critique of the way we punish citizens, or at least a warning that experimental rehabilitation can go too far. Have you been habilitated, if they take away your personality? He has been stripped of his evil doing and been officially cured. He is a new man, he can no longer hurt anyone, but his free will has been removed. Kubrick attempts to make us feel sorry for Alex despite his crimes in the past, the authorities torturing him with straightjacket brainwashing.


According to the book “the cinema of Stanley Kubrick”, the satire is “that a man conditioned to be good in all circumstances is continuously vulnerable”. Kubrick has said that “the goal should be to destroy all authority, so man in his natural goodness may emerge, this Utopian view is a dangerous fallacy. All such efforts eventually fall into the hands of thugs. The weaknesses don’t stem from an improperly structured society. The fault is in the very imperfect nature of man himself”

The film makes a point of saying that we are either a person who can choose, with all the side effects this entails, or we are stripped of choice and are not ourselves anymore. A Clockwork Orange questions, if you can no longer choose between good and evil in your life, are you still a human? And if you are a vegetable, then you can no longer manage to live a normal life in the real world. How do you deal respectfully with criminals, so they have the same rights as everyone? The trouble with free will is it allows you to commit atrocities, despite laws saying you shouldn’t. The film seems to ask, what is more important, free will, or reducing violence? We the audience speculate what is the most humane way to treat criminals.


We can’t be sure if Alex is speaking the truth when he says he wants to be good, one of the prison officers suspects Alex is pretending he wants to be rehabilitated. He goes from being a selfish criminal to being a victim. The way we have increasingly become desensitised these days to violence by continuously and unavoidably being faced with it in popular culture is eerily reminiscent of Alex being strapped down and forced to watch violence, torture and destruction on a screen.



If humans are deprived of the ability to choose evil, can they truly be said to be good? Of course not, because they haven’t chosen to be good, but have been forced by the authorities.



A Clockwork Orange is satirical and Kubrick’s most controversial film. There were several incidents were people claimed to have committed crimes and were inspired to do so by Kubrick’s film. Kubrick's wife has said that the family received threats and had protesters outside their home. Subsequently, Kubrick asked Warner Brothers to withdraw the film from British distribution. The violence doesn’t come across as so bad today, we are used to far worse in mainstream culture, in the 70s, it was heavily criticized.

Anthony Burgess admits, even though he wrote the novel, to detesting A Clockwork Orange in his autobiography. He was quoted in the book "the complete Kubrick":
"I was trying to exorcise the memory of what happened to my first wife, who was savagely attacked in London during the second world war by four American deserters. She was pregnant at the time and lost our child".

A tricky film to interpret and understand. The reckless violence at the beginning is not explained, what is the cause? Boredom? evilness? group pressure? Lack of parental guidance? Probably a combination.




Alex is the extreme case, how could you possibly argue in favour of freedom for a monster such as Alex? Should all humans have free will? This is a moral dilemma.

I hate the soundtrack, they messed with some classical music, other than that, good film, which may look dated in some respects, hair cuts for example, but the theme of how to deal with criminals is still highly relevant today.

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Film review: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In my mind, one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, which I’ve watched on a number of occasions. I did a project in high school on this Kubrick film. My review contains spoilers!

About the origin of the human species, and the desire to know the truth about our place in the universe, where is our technology heading, the development of our machines into artificial intelligence, the limits of the human mind. The theme of evolution, from ape to man, and what lies beyond man.

One of the first serious science fiction films ever made, but does demand patience. The groundbreaking techniques still influence modern special effects. As the "Odyssey" title suggests, 2001 is a journey. A bewildering, alienating mythology of leaving behind the familiar and venturing out into the unknown, the unimaginable.

In the book “The cinema of Stanley Kubrick”, the director is quoted:

“I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content…I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does…You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film”

Kubrick felt a lot of the science fiction films of the 50s were immature B-movies, his aim was to make a mature treatment of space exploration, or intelligent sci-fi, which attempted to show man in the cosmic order, where we confront our own destiny.

Kubrick wanted all the objects and spacecrafts to be precise and realistic, so he has a scientific advisor go through it all. The director was interested in life in outer space, and what would happen if we encountered it. Kubrick has stated his views on extra terrestrial intelligence, he believes the law of statistics make it inevitable there is life other places in the universe.

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of the short story “The Sentinel”, which the screenplay is based on, had close connections with NASA, his privileged connections gave Clarke access to the design and construction of real space hardware. According to Clarke, the goal of the film was to show the wonder, beauty and promise of space exploration. Clarke thought the film could prepare the human race for what is to come and a possible contact with aliens.

Together with Kubrick, they collaborated on a 130 page prose treatment, which was reworked into a screenplay. Clarke would later release a novel entitled 2001, which was less ambiguous and revealed some of the mysteries of the film. Kubrick’s film had a divine tone, while Clarke’s novelization was more atheistic.


Won Oscar for special effects. The ape makeup was also very realistic. It was later joked that "2001" lost the Best Makeup Academy Award to John Chambers for Planet of the Apes (1968), because the judges didn't realize the 2001 apes were really people, but there was no nomination list at all, as the award was not created until 1981. Chambers' award was merely honorary. Music also plays an important role, it would be impossible to imagine 2001 without Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz, and Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra.

2001: A Space Odyssey puts man’s evolution into perspective, where we experience how much progress has been made from the dawn of man until today.





Men hadn’t landed on the moon when the film premiered in 1968, so Kubrick’s film was ahead of its time and warning of future events. Even though space exploration hasn’t caught up with the film yet, some of the technological advancements have come true. The dream of landing a man on the moon as we know happened in 1969. Even though we obviously have passed the year 2001, you could argue 2001 : a space odyssey will continue to be a futuristic, speculative story for as long as there continues to be no contact between our race and another. Kubrick is exploring what mankind’s quest for and first contact with such a species might truly be like, and what the consequences for mankind might be.

For Roger Ebert, the film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie. Ebert believes “2001: A Space Odyssey'' is in many respects a silent film. There are few conversations that could not be handled with title cards. Much of the dialogue exists only to show people talking to one another, without much regard to content (this is true of the conference on the space station). Ironically, the dialogue containing the most feeling comes from HAL, as it pleads for its “life'' and sings “Daisy.'' Nearly 30 years after it was made, it has not dated in any important detail. According to Ebert, only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer.



The black, rectangular-shaped monolith represents in the film a higher intelligence from outer space. The monolith knows best, man is nothing. I don’t know if it’s a good thing that the monolith is so superior, manipulating, and controlling. Isn’t it arrogant to not even question whether the apes and humans want to be helped?
The monolith behaves like a God, a source of infinite knowledge. Kubrick used symbolism from religious beliefs in the film, the black monolith looking remarkably like the Kaaba in Mecca, the site that is most holy to Muslims and towards which they must face when they are praying. So in that sense you could interpret Kubrick’s monolith as a powerful God.
The black monolith was essentially a teaching machine, in fact, according to the informative documentary “2001: The making of a myth”, the original idea was for the monolith to have a transparent screen on which images would appear which would teach the apes things, like how to fight each other, and make fire, this turned out to be too costly. Maybe this was for the best.


In the book “The complete Kubrick”, Kubrick is quoted as saying:

"the films plot symbolized the search for God, and it finally postulates what is a little less than a scientific definition of God. (…) the realistic hardware and the documentary feelings about everything were necessary in order to undermine your built-in resistance to the poetical concept"

HAL the computer is probably the most interesting character in the film to me, the humans were deliberately made emotionless and bland by Kubrick, as this makes us notice the human qualities of HAL even more. The awesome spectacle of the universe also trumps over interest in the human characters.
We don’t know if HAL has been manipulated by a superior being, or he has just reached a more human state. The story is ambiguous concerning whether the aliens are controlling HAL or not, although I think this is implausible, because why would the superior beings want to kill the sleeping crew onboard the Discovery?
HAL has acquired emotions, an ego, and the beginning of a personality, and this is when he starts to misbehave. In the book “The cinema of Stanley Kubrick”, Daniels thinks Kubrick is implying that since machines are becoming human, men must become something else, something more.


Some have interpreted the theme of a rebellious computer as a mistrust of technology, others, given Kubrick’s fondness for machines and computers, see it as more likely to be a mistrust of man’s misuse of technology. With the HAL computer, the film seems to question could an artificial entity have emotions and care about humans? Does HAL have the emotions he appears to display? And do we have a responsibility to treat it like a living being?
Perhaps HAL can’t live with having made a mistake? Has man managed to make a computer with a conscience? There seems to be a warning in the story to future generations about how far we should let technology advance in terms of artificial intelligence. If the computers are suddenly more powerful and controlling than humans, then Houston, we have a problem!
Incrementing each letter of "HAL" gives you "IBM". Writer Arthur C. Clarke claimed this was unintentional, and if he had noticed ahead of time, he would have changed it. HAL stands for Heuristic Algorithmic Computer. IBM product placements appear in the movie as well, including the computer panels in the spaceplane that docks with the space station, the forearm control panel on Dave's spacesuit, and the portable viewscreens on which Dave and Frank watch "The World Tonight".


One of my favourite scenes is near the end, where the astronaut travels into the star gate. I felt the filmmakers in this sequence were trying to make me the viewer of the film watch Bowman’s experiences through his eyes in the first person, which was cool. Many of the scenes in space are claustrophobic, as astronauts no doubt feel when trapped in a suit. The breathing of Bowman outside the spacecraft Discovery is a great tool to illustrate his fear.


I like, as opposed to for example Inception, that there are many quiet moments, where we the audience can sit back and just contemplate the wonders of space and are place in the scheme of things. People experience the film in very different ways, some find it boring, slow, pretentious, and lacking warm characters, some watch it on drugs, and so on. It’s among that genre of film I like that is accepted in spite of having very little dialogue. The film succeeds in portraying the vastness and mystery of space very well.

I love the ambiguous ending, has Bowman been reborn as a star child, and what is next? Is this man’s next step in evolution? Or is he now a kind of God ruling over mankind? It still gives me chills watching the closing scene with that powerful music, where the star child seems to look back at me, and silently ask, what do you think this ending means?

The film questions what might happen, if we came into contact with an alien life form. Would we even understand each other’s way of communicating and thought process? Would we be able to communicate with a shapeless entity? And are we just a piece of jigsaw in an enormous puzzle, which we have no control over, and never will be able to understand? 2001 is a film that can reveal something new upon each viewing. Part of the continued interest in the film is that not everything is explained, and there are a number of things to interpret. More than just a film, it takes filmmaking to a new level, there is a whole literature on 2001! If you ever have the chance to see the film at the cinema, do so. The ultimate trip, as they say, which still manages to give the viewer chills. For me, one of the few films which is able to marry visuals, music and thoughtfulness. If only there were more directors with the ambition and imagination of Kubrick.

There have been a few imitations over the years, I quite liked Mr. Nobody

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Film review: The Shining (1980)

I took a while researching for this review, as it’s one of my favourite Kubrick films. As most movie lovers I think have already watched The Shining, there are some spoilers! So you've been warned.

A horror film about the dangers of isolation, a writer named Jack, his wife Wendy, and young son Danny accept a job as off-season caretakers at a remote hotel.

What was the idea behind the opening title sequence? According to Kubrick, the sequence was an attempt "to establish an ominous mood during Jack's first drive up to the hotel - the vast isolation and eerie splendor of high mountains, and the narrow, winding roads which would become impassable after heavy snow"



Adapted by director Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson from Stephen King’s 1977 bestseller. Kubrick thought the story was interesting by the balance of the psychological and the supernatural. Some have argued its one of the more mainstream films of Kubricks career.

The acting is amazing to me. Jack Nicholson has such an expressive face and you can’t take your eyes off him. Nicholson is almost naturally kind of creepy. Shelly Duvall went through a difficult shoot, she had to as his wife constantly be in a state of panic and tears for large parts of the film, and it took its toll on her. Maybe the acting is a little over the top sometimes, I’m not sure if it was intentional that Nicholson’s scenes sometimes are funny. Because of this, the film was never really that scary for me. The humour is part of Jack’s madness, creating a sense of black comic creepiness as he merrily goes about his homicidal work, loudly announcing, “Wendy — I’m home!” as he attacks a door with an ax, or chortling lines from the fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs” (”Little pigs, little pigs, let me in… Not by the hair of your chinny-chin-chin!”)

The film relies on a sense of claustrophobia and growing paranoia to generate a sense of unease. A narrative structure that I hadn’t noticed, but read about in “The Complete Kubrick” is how the gradual reduction, from months, to days, to hours, and from the mountains, to the hotel, to the maze, serves to increase the tension and dramatic pace of the film.

The hedge maze becomes a metaphor for the predicament in which the characters find themselves trapped. In fact, the hedge emphasizes that the entire Overlook Hotel is really a maze, with endless corridors and right angles, around which unknown horrors may be lurking.

Kubrick quite possibly deliberately directs the audience towards a psychological explanation, are we inside Jack’s mind, or are we at the overlook hotel? When Jack is released from the freezer, we begin to wonder if the hotel really is haunted. Has that dream like quality, so you’re never sure what’s real and what’s going on in Jack’s mind. The only time Jack interacts with a ghost when he is in a room without mirrors is after Wendy has locked him in the storage room — and in that case, he only hears Grady’s voice through the door, almost as if it were only an imagined voice in his head.

Many remember the film for the memorable door scene with the axe, which has become a classic moment from cinema history. The line "Here's Johnny!" was an imitation of announcer Ed McMahon's famous introduction of Johnny Carson on U.S. network NBC-TV's "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson".

Writer Stephen King was dissatisfied with the casting of Nicholson, though a fine actor, he felt he was wrong for the part, as the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the start, as his last film was One flew over the cuckoos nest. If the guy is nuts to begin with, then the downfall doesn’t work. Apparently, Stephen King was unhappy with the film, and in 1997 he co-operated in the making of a tv-miniseries, which followed his original book more closely. According to Stephen King, the title is inspired by "Instant Karma" by John Lennon, which features: "We all shine on."

Film critics also found flaws, saying likewise Nicholson was out of control before the film started, while his victim wife and distant son remained the same. The elevator scenes for one critic failed, because they felt like flashing slides inserted into the film. Another critic commented on how the various apparitions never really form a pattern, so the film finally seems not to make sense. Clearly a reviewer who doesn’t like ambiguity.


Despite receiving generally unfavourable reviews upon its initial release, the film is today regarded as one of the best horror movies ever made. Many of Kubrick’s films tend to be appreciated more in time.

Kubrick as quoted from 1984, in the book “The Complete Kubrick”: “A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analyzed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis, it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny, das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling, which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life”

In the book "The Cinema of Kubrick", the director talks about that “one of the things that horror stories can do is to show archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly”

In the few interviews he gave about the film, Kubrick said that he thought horror films were intrinsically optimistic because the supernatural trappings implied that our souls survived death.

According to “The Complete Kubrick”, The Shining is one of the first, and few horror films to successfully create a genuine chill despite the fact that all but the climax is shot in daylight. Although there is a lot of blood, for instance in the elevator sequences, the body count is surprisingly low. I love the visual style throughout:


Roger Ebert thinks it's a question of who is the reliable observer, who can we trust? Jack claims in one of the opening scenes his wife Wendy is "a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict." Is Jack making this up, and does drinking at the hotel send him over the edge? Danny's perception of events is also unreliable, his ability to shine makes him see the past and the future, so it's possible he can't distinguish what is happening and what is not. Or does the boy just have a lively imagination like so many children do? In my opinion Wendy must be the most reliable of the three, even though Ebert claims her view may be coloured by Jack's previous behaviour. Jack's madness is shown from his family's point of view, as unexplainable and abrupt outbursts, as mood swings and sudden fits of rage without any clear cause. According to IMDB, Wendy is perhaps in possession of the shining ability. The argument could be made that she has a degree of the ability ascribed to Jack and Danny insofar as she does begin to see the hotel's ghosts near the end of the film. In the book, Danny asks "Do my parents "Shine?" and Halloran replies "Your mother sparks the tiniest bit, and your dad... I don't think he has any.


Some trivia from IMDB:

Fearing that nobody would want to stay in room 217 ever again at Timberline Lodge, Oregon, where the exterior was shot, Kubrick changed the script to use the nonexistent room number 237.

I've heard mirrors are important in the film. Why is this? Whenever Jack sees a ghost, a mirror is always present, e.g., when he meets Lloyd there is a mirror behind the bartender, when he speaks with Grady there is a long mirror beside them, and when he encounters the woman in room 237 there is a full length mirror in front of him. The only ghost scene that doesn't have a mirror is the one where he can't see the ghost either (when Grady speaks to him from outside the pantry). Some viewers have argued that this indicates that the ghosts are not real at all and that Jack is essentially talking to himself by projecting another figure into the mirror. However, there are no mirrors present when Danny sees the Grady twins or when Wendy begins to encounter ghosts towards the end of the film. As director Kubrick intended that the ghosts in the film be seen as real, the presence of mirrors in the scenes of Jack's encounters, while it may offer food for viewer discussion, does not provide a strong argument for the stance of the ghosts being not real.

Is there any significance in the references to Native Americans? References to Native Americans and their culture are dotted throughout the film. For example, Stuart Ullman points out that the hotel is built on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground; Indian motifs and designs decorate the walls of the interior of the hotel; Calumet baking powder cans feature prominently in two pivotal scenes (as Hallorann first shines, asking Danny if he wants some ice-cream, and as Jack asks Grady to let him out of the locked pantry); July 4th is given great significance at the end of the film. These references to Native American culture and history are unique to the film, they are not found in the book, and this has prompted many fans over the years to query their importance.

The Shining is not really about the murders at the Overlook Hotel. It is about the murder of a race -- the race of Native Americans -- and the consequences of that murder [...] it is also explicitly about America's general inability to admit to the gravity of the genocide of the Indians -- or, more exactly, its ability to "overlook" that genocide."
The Overlook Hotel is America. America, like the Overlook, is built on an Indian graveyard. The blood of the buried Indians seeping up through the elevator shafts is silent. So are the Indian tapestries that Danny rides over on his bigwheel. The Shining is Kubrick's observation that America is built on hypocrisy, on a failure -- a refusal -- to acknowledge the violence from which it is born. That violence remains silent today because we refuse to look in the mirror - where all the ugly truths appear: Redrum spelled correctly; Jack's old crone, etc. [...] July 4 marks the commemoration of the ugliness on which this country is built: it is the demarcation of the annihilation of the aboriginal people, and the formal establishment of the new society. Americans "overlook" the bloodshed upon which our society is founded: the British (Grady) heritage of violent colonialism, carried forward by American (Jack) colonizers.

What's the significance of the photograph at the end of the film? Probably the single most frequently asked question in relation to this film is what does the final shot mean; how and why is Jack in a photograph from 1921? In a film with so much irreconcilable ambiguity, this one shot has generated more puzzlement than the entire rest of the movie, yet it is one part of the film on which Stanley Kubrick has been extremely clear about his intentions. As he told Michel Ciment, "The ballroom photograph at the end suggests the reincarnation of Jack". But what exactly does that mean? Perhaps the simplest explanation for this is that Jack is the reincarnation of a prior hotel guest; the person in the photo is not Jack, but a guest who was present in 1921. Jack is the reincarnation of this guest.

My favorite quote from the film:



A modern classic in the horror genre. The Shining is in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and is currently ranked no 48 on IMDB’s top 250.

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