Movie Review: Charly

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The film, Charly, directed and produced by Ralph Nelson, was released in September of 1968. It is an American science fiction drama film based on the book “Flowers for Algernon” written by Daniel Keyes. The film tells the audience the story of Charly, a 30-year-old and intellectually disable man who is struggling to survive the “normal” society. He has been taught by Alice Kinnian how to read and write for 2 years and he has a strong desire to learn, however his attempts to learn prove to be difficult. He qualified to be part of an experiment to increase his intelligence. This experiment has only been tried on laboratory mice, however helps Charly to rise his very low IQ to be a genius. This film can be related to three themes: the struggle …show more content…

The theme, struggle for human dignity, is presented in the character of Charly, in which it is possible for the audience to observe that he suffers from an internal and external conflict with his character struggling for dignity against human weakness presented in his own personality. As Charly grows more intelligent in the movie, he realizes that people feel superior to him and treat him as intellectual inferior and less of a human being that they are. For instance, his coworkers at the bakery have treated him as a disable man with meanness. In one of the scenes of the movie they filled Charly’s locker with dough in the morning that has yeast in it. So, when he went to his locker at the end of the day, it has increased to a huge pile of dough that he cannot …show more content…

All of those are seen throughout the movie mostly in Charly’s character and his relationship with Alice. In the closing scene of the movie, we see Charly fortunately playing with kids in the playground, showing that he “is more better off as he was, outside rather than inside ‘normal’ society” (Sternberg 173). Therefore, Charly is an insightful movie, in which gives the message that as humans we need to accept people the way they are and that each human is beautiful in its own

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