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A Masterpiece!

A Disappointing Continuation

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Alphaville is a sci-fi detective story, a kind of proto-Blade Runner, with French New Wave charm (the kind which makes your favorite electronica artist probably be in love with it). The film is both visionary and naive, stylish and gauche, but the plusses far overmaster the negatives. This is the type of film where you can see how good it is by noticing its flaws, and thinking: "Ah, but so what, this is still such a good movie." The one exception is the love story, there really is not much of any chemistry there, and it is a kind of anti-Casablanca, in that respect. (Yet even this flaw works, and is not such a flaw, if you think about why it does not work and the themes of the film.) Nonetheless, Alphaville is a must-see for lovers of art and film.

The most underrated sci-fi movie ever! I love dystopia histories since I was a kid, then this movie - summed up with the french touch to cinema and the amazing weird camera's positioning from Nouvelle Vague (especially to a sci-fi movie) - has made it one of my favorite movies of all times.And I confess that I was stoked when I found that he used a Borges citation in some scenes. Besides other references to my favorite writer.If I can share a little spoiler there, what most amaze me about Alpha 60 is the dichotomy between doesn't understanding poetry and actually citing them. Such a Borgian plot.Definitely a must watch.

In a near future, the American secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) travels to Alphaville posing as the journalist Ivan Johnson from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. His mission is to find the missing agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamirof) and to convince Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon) to come with him to Nueva York. Prof. von Braun is actually Leonard Nosferatu and has created the powerful computer Alpha 60 that has conceived the inhuman dystopian society of Alphaville, where love, conscience, poetry and emotion have been banished and words are systematically eliminated from the dictionary. Alpha 60 is also omnipresent and Lemmy has the assistance of Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), who is the daughter of von Braun. Soon he falls in love with Natacha but he needs to complete his mission before leaving Alphaville."Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy" is my favorite Godard movie and maybe his most digestible film despite being weird. This is the third time that I see this sci-fi noir (last time was on 07 September 2001) and it is still an intriguing story that resembles George Orwell's 1984, inclusive with the idea of rewriting the dictionary removing words related to emotions and including new ones. The scary atmosphere gives the sensation of nightmare and the sets and locations are ahead of time. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Alphaville"

This film by Jean Luc-Godard is an intentional mixture of the profound and the ridiculous, which is part of its existentialist satirical plan. Eddie Constantine satirizes himself and much else besides as Lemmy Caution, Spy 003 from the Outer Countries who has been sent to Alphaville, the capital of another galaxy. Three years earlier he had already made fun of himself as the archetypal tough guy detective in the spoof film L'EMPIRE DE LA NUIT (THE EMPIRE OF NIGHT, 1962). Since Eddie reached Alphaville (despite its being in another galaxy) by car, we later learn that it can be reached by driving along the Boulevard Périphérique all night. (For those unfamiliar with Paris, the Boulevard Périphérique is the Paris ring road.) Eddie disguises himself as Ivan Johnson, a journalist working for the newspaper Figaro-Pravda. For those too young to remember, Pravda was the name of the newspaper of the Soviet Union, and Le Figaro is the conservative newspaper of Paris; the idea of their having merged at this unknown time in the future is one of Godard's dozens of little jokes. Some of the humour was funnier in the sixties than now, but much of it is still amusing. In most scenes, Eddie wears his trenchcoat with the collar turned up and his hat, whether indoors or out. He often flails his automatic pistol in his hand and shoots lots of people to right and to left, who obligingly drop down dead. Godard uses hyper-dramatic music just like what was used in the American films noir of the forties and fifties, and he plays it on purpose at the most inappropriate moments: more intentional hysterical fun. Many of the jokes are of a cinematic nature, so you have to know your movies. The French New Wave directors adored Hitchcock and Hollywood noir films, so the satire is always mixed with homage. Alphaville is populated by futuristic 'mutants' who have moved beyond feelings and follow perfect logic, to form a new perfect species. Anyone who feels anything is executed. There is an amazing scene where a man who dared to grieve when his wife died is machine-gunned to death on a diving board and falls into the swimming pool. Such eruptions of surrealism are common in the film, as are mournful expressions of existentialist anguish narrated on the sound track. Every week, several words such as 'tendresse' ('tenderness') are erased from the Bible (their name for the dictionary of permitted words), and anyone uttering them is executed. No one in Alphaville has ever heard the word 'love' or the word 'conscience'. All women are branded with tattooed numbers like inmates of the Nazi death camps, and all are sex slaves, at least the attractive ones. There are no unattractive women in the film, so perhaps they were also all executed for the offence of being ugly. At the time he made this film, Godard still had talent and had not yet deteriorated into whatever he became twenty years later, when he made what I have described in my review of it as 'the most pretentious film ever made', namely DÉTECTIVE (1985, see my review). The female lead in this film is the mysterious and alluring Anna Karina, who had many men round the world gasping at that time, although when she gives those long lingering looks in loving closeups she does seem a bit too conscious of her own charms sometimes. But then, that has also been a fault of Emmanuelle Béart, and female vanity when it becomes visible can be most unsettling, not to say irritating. Karina plays Natacha von Braun, the daughter of Professor von Braun who was expelled to Alphaville in 1964 (the year this film was being made), bringing his daughter with him who is now, in the future, all grown up and beautiful but unable to know how to say those magic words: 'I love you.' However, as she is not really a native of Alphaville, Eddie sees some hope for her. Her father, whom she tells Eddie she has never met, had worked at Los Alamos, and is clearly intended as a reference to the SS officer and rocket scientist Werner von Braun who created the American space programme, though the exact point of the satire concerning this point is lost on me, I am sad to say. Nearly every scene of this film contains interesting lines, either of dialogue or of voice-over, much of it poetry. Among other things, we are told that poetry 'turns darkness into light'. This film, in between all the foolery, is a plea for love, beauty, and poetry. If it did not relentlessly make fun of itself, we might be tempted to say it takes itself too seriously, but it does a balancing act between farce and anguished existentialism, as if Sartre had suddenly become Groucho Marx (and who is to say he never did, or was not all along?) Alphaville is run by a giant computer with 1.4 billion 'nodes', or terminals, called Alpha 60. It has a deep grumbly voice which gives the impression of being several octaves lower than Orson Welles. Alpha 60 wants to wage war on the Outer Countries such as Earth in order to eradicate emotion and feeling, but instead, in the latter part of the film, the inhabitants of Alphaville are all staggering round and falling down dead because of lack of love. Perhaps they did not know whether to laugh or to cry, anymore than we do when watching this, and died of incoherence. (One wonders whether Al-Ghazzali died of it also, or whether he perished from a simple excess of orthodoxy.) The final words spoken in the film are the most important, and confirm our suspicions that this film had a profound and serious purpose, but I cannot reveal them to the uninitiated, any more than I can explain the point of a dagger against the bared chest.