It turns out that a very strange book makes for an even strange film. Who would have thought?

Codpieces and milkbars and ultraviolence (oh my). It’s a movie that very much deserves the R rating, both for violence and sexual content. If either of those bother you, this is most certainly not the movie for you. Add to that a bit of the body horror during the ‘reeducation scenes’ (I’d had to be the actor in those…) and it’s at times a hard movie to watch.

Visually, it’s stylistically a beautiful movie. To a modern eye, it’s got a very much strong retro-future vibe, taking the styles of the 60/70s (released in 1971) and twisting them. Which, for a movie like this, really works, since it’s both out of date and futuristic to the modern eye. I love it.

Castwise, Alex just works. The rest of his ‘droogs’ were … interchangable, which may have been intentional. His family seemed older than I expected and the woman he accidently murdered younger. So it goes.

The dialect that got to be rather a bit much in the book is toned down in the film–primarily because we don’t have a nonstop, in the head commentary done in the same. It makes it quirky rather than overbearing, which I appreciated.

Overall, it’s… a complicated movie. It’s a solid adaptation of the book (among the best in that regard I’ve ever seen; albeit without the ‘21st chapter’). There’s plenty of shock scenes (violent and sexual) if that’s something you’re looking for. But it’s hard to watch and a bit slow at times. I’m glad to have seen it, but I don’t know if I’ll ever watch it again.