12 Sci-Fi Movie Endings That Were Almost Completely Different
5. A Clockwork Orange - Alex Almost Found God
This one was switched out in order to change the moral message of the original novel which Barry Lyndon director/ all-round mercurial genius Stanley Kubrick was adapting, true to the director’s typical form.
Later Kubrick would cut the relative redemption afforded to The Shining’s protagonist Jack Torrance and instead give him a cruel and frankly embarrassing fate, and similarly there was no way that ultraviolence advocate and Beethoven stan Alex DeLarge would abandon his love of wanton cruelty in favour of Christ’s teachings the way he does in Anthony Burgess’ far less cynical source novel.
No, rather than finding the welcoming embrace of Christianity at the end of his story, the film’s version of Alex is left a shattered shell of a man, unable to defend himself, hopeless, and utterly mentally broken.
Cheery stuff there, Stan.