Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, and philosophical
Review: Jean-Luc Godard, the most experimental and influential filmmaker from the French New Wave, made this film in 1965, about an out of control, totalitarian, scientific, logical society. Lemmy Caution, a spy from the outlands, comes to Alphaville, under the name Ivan Johnson to investigate. He discovers a society run by a supercomputer Alpha 65, and populated by brainwashed drones, where love, art, and emotions are against the law. Lemmy gets involved with Alphaville's top scientist's daughter. He helps her discover her true human nature, they fall in love, and together they fight the leaders of Alphaville, and Alpha 65 itself. The film is fast paced, reminiscent of crime thrillers, and of sci-fi dystopians such as Blade Runner. The film examines human nature, and the redeeming value of love, and spirit, over mind, and material. The film is both very entertaining, and philosophical, that rewards multiple viewing, that offers new insights. I recommend this very much. 5 stars.
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Summary: Jean Luc Goddard's triumph over Science Fiction
Review: Jean Luc Goddard presents a brilliant look at an Huxleyian future, with comedy made uncomfortable by a callously violent society. All this with an Occam's Razor stance concerning special effects.
I purchased this film without having ever seen it prior, and was not disappointed. 'Blade Runner' and 'THX-1138' owe much to this film, much as many great films following would necessarily have to. Even the wonderfully clumsy science fiction of 'Logan's Run' is reminiscent in spots.
The story is properly disjointed, and keeps the viewer off-kilter even to the very end. The 'hero' is as much an 'anti-hero', and his purpose in the film is as necessarily vague in direction as the society that surrounds him. A veritable cinema verite romp through Goddard's bizarrely violent and humorous world. Highly recommended to fans of films already mentioned, as well as fans of 'Dark City', 'City of Lost Children', and many other such futuristic visions of inner-city dwelling.
Rating: 
Summary: a weird film and quite interesting
Review: This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. This film which is one of several involving the character Lemmy Caution remains popular to this day as one of the few science fiction films with no special effects. It is a good view of a technocratic society an has elements which at the time seemed like fantasy but in our computer age seems more feasible. The film also has a voice over that is really deep and raspy that sounds very interesting. The DVD does not have any special features but still is a good one to buy.
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Summary: Godardonia
Review: Godard's brilliant sci-fi film whose theme is shared by such works as Zardoz, THX-1138, etc. The story is similar to Apocalypse Now, a man on a mission to terminate the enemy's command. Alphaville is run by a hoarse voiced computer(chainsmoking precursor to Hal?)whose pervasive influence has organized the city into a lab-mall of zombies. Lemmy Caution is a Bogart-like hero, cynical like Yojimbo, but with a hidden but strong sense of individuality.
Alphaville is a biting satirical indictment against modern society, of everything from technology trapped within its circular logic to desensitizing and narcotic influence of pop culture. One may argue that Lemmy Caution, like Dick Tracy, is a pop cultural icon, therefore part of the problem, yet Godard seems to be arguing that truth or romance or poetry isn't a matter of science or myth, high art or low art, but a sense of individuality. Whether involved in a drawing a comic book, writing a book, or making a movie, what matters is one's commitment to one's own vision, good or bad, sane or insane.
Along with Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and Chris Marker's Le Jetee, this is intellectual sci-fi on a very high order.
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Summary: Might help us catch up a little with Godard!
Review: Published screenplays should be as irrelevant to the film lover as instructions on the side of self-raising flour are to the gourmet. At best, their interest is limited to scholars and researchers. In the case of Jean-Luc Cinema Godard, however, they are a godsend. Godard's films are so dense, even simply on the verbal level, with allusions, philosophical ideas, aphorisms, puns, complex jokes etc., it is impossible to take them all in during a single viewing. Publishing a screenplay like 'Alphaville' (a sci-fi/detective thriller in which a totalitarian, technocratic regime run by a HAL-like computer is overthrown not by weapons or physical skill, but by a book of Surrealist poetry (Eluard's 'La capitale de la douleur')) is therefore invaluable, and allows us to return to the film more open to its visual astonishments. As was common with the director, Godard didn't actually work from a completed script; this verbatim transcript from the finished film was originally made to facilitate sub-title work. This edition contains a fine introduction by French cinema specialist Richard Roud, explaining some of Godard's visual sources and the 'ethical' meaning of his stylistic choices (the circle is evil, etc.); over 30 stills and photos from production; and Godard's original treatment (entitled 'A new Lemmy Caution Adventure'), which is fascinating to compare with the finished masterpiece, as well as revealing how completely different the concepts 'story' and 'mise-en-scene' are for Godard.
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Summary: The Eternal Theme of the Individual VS The State
Review: It should not surprise anyone that a film from Jean-Luc Godard will invariably attract the usual assortment of Post-Modernist, ethically and politically retarded, anti-Western afficionados. Some of that can be seen in the reviews for this film, both on this page and throughout the Internet. The truth however, is that while Godard was a borderline socialist and critical of the supposed decadence of "America", he was more of a heroic individualist than anything else and his pre-1970 films all demonstrate this fact. Alphavile is without a doubt, his greatest achievement and it is a work that speaks of an artistic sensibility all but lost in the France of today, which is overun with rampant anti-intellectualism and a worship of un-reason. Godard takes the Bogart-like "Lemmy Caution" character out of his former slew of 40/50's French spy thrillers and puts the very same character into a future where a technocratic dictatorship exists. In doing so, the very best idealism of American pulp-fiction is given back its soul by a French director, Godard, who truly was interested in the world of ideas. This film not only shows why a totalitarian state must be destroyed, it also demonstrates some key philosophical concepts in the process. Through Godard, we learn that it is language that first must be assaulted before one can enslave man, then mathematics, then history and finally, the human mind itself. We can see parallels to this line of thinking through the world today and yet, how ironic that it is today's France that probably best embodies Godard's nightmare come to life (for a Western democracy of course). The cinematography of Alphaville is superb, as is the musical score by Paul Misraki which is one of the finest I have experienced, for it reaches its crescendo with the most important line in the film, almost as an answer to a question. The theme of Alphaville is simple enough - the Individual against the State, but the soul of Alphaville reaches higher to a level where Man is sanctified against all intrusions on his life, liberty and happiness. Anna Karina plays the part of the Ideal Woman still capable of feeling and understanding the value of love and that immortal word that may still one day save humanity - "I". It is a rare thing to find a work of art that speaks so eloquently to the sublime beauty of Man, Humanity and Individualism. Godard does this and more in Alphaville and for that, he should go down in history as one of Europe's finest artists. Note - One would need to watch this film about 3 times to completely grasp every important nuance. Also, Anthem and 1984 are good reads along the same vain.
Rating: 
Summary: An Analysis of Genre
Review: As usual with Godard moments stand out. In this film the most absurd sequence involves a diving platform in what looks to be an eastern bloc recreational center and a number of black sweatered and bereted revolutionaries with sub-machine guns standing on the pool deck spraying the divers as they dive. Whats it all mean? Well I suppose you could say its Godards way of commenting on the wests ability to turn even political oppression into mass entertainment. I like a number of Godard films: Breathless, My Life To Live, Contempt, Pierrot Le Fou, First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary, In Praise of Love --still Alphaville remains kind of a hard one for me to get into. Perhaps because I am not too keen on science fiction. It seems the people who like this film are the ones who like science fiction in general. To me science fiction is full of cliches and so is film noir and so to me it seems Godard is using these genres to address cultural cliches -- and yet he is also making pointed comments on modern culture as he does so. You can always count on a Godard film to be smart and even though its not one of my favorites Alphaville is no exception to that rule. Anna Karina looks great as always. Unfortunately for Lemmy Caution she is the daughter of Alphaville's overlord. No one really believes the future will look like a parking garage nor that a super-computer will run our lives and that people will become vacant automatons. Only a handful of early twentieth-century authors thought the future was leading us toward Alphaville. In the context of the swinging sixties sci fi just looks campy and noir even campier. Whats going on in Godards head? Hard to say in this film. To me its funny, but a surprising amount of people seem to take this sci fi stuff seriously. I think the new wave band of outsiders enjoyed genre hopping because it gave them a chance to flex their movie knowledge. Plus genres come loaded with rules which the new wavers can then subvert -- so that is the fun of Alphaville, subversion of genre and in this case its a double dose of subversion because Godards subverting two genres, sci fi and noir. I think its interesting to note that in both of these genres men and women relate in steretypical and fatalistic ways -- and the new wave was about being hyper-conscious of these film conventions. Perhaps what Godard is really saying is that in order to invent life anew we must break free of these conventions. This is of course something his characters often fail to do although in some films they try.
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Summary: Great Transfer of Great Film with NO Extras
Review: ...Needs no introduction. The Criterion DVD is subpar only due to lack of extras (hence the three stars). Very strange for Criterion. Nice transfer of a beautiful print with generous chaptering. Still, a trailer or at least some production stills would have been nice.
Rating: 
Summary: French Fried Orwell
Review: Curate a screening of Godard's *Alphaville* for today's Digerati. Snag as many technocrats, cognitive logicians, Kripkean analytical philosophers, MIT scions, and 80K-a-year knowledge-workers as you can. Solicit written responses, interview and exit-poll all participants, organize post-screening discussion forums and commission Internet listservs. Then collate and publish your results. Will a single respondent feel threatened, unhinged, pressured, or destabilized by Godard's film in any way? Will palms sweat? Will nerves twitch? Will pulse-rates tweak their median? Will personae jangle into self-scrutiny? More tellingly, will anyone identify *personally* with Von Braun, or the Tracheotomy 6000 supercomputer, or the starry-eyed meat puppets of Alphaville? Or would it be the pomo gunslinger Lemmy Caution who would centrifugally soak up the room's empathic vibes? As any Wired magazine subscriber knows, today's technocrats perceive themselves as Byronic cyber-noir blade runners who shoot from the hip with the same stiff-lipped abandon as Eddie Constantine. They are, in effect, much closer to the alchemical thaumaturgy of Doc Faustus than the neurotic, pre-Wittgensteinian positivism on display in Godard's profoundly silly, genre-slumming film. *Alphaville* is not quite schlock -- it is, rather, an artfully contrived, theoretically-riven visual artifact that models itself precariously on, well, schlock. Less a node of useful, psychosocial critique than a metaphor-laden Soviet theme-park of the hyperreal. For when played counterpoint to the culture is traduces, *Alphaville* reads like a closed parenthesis. A cryogenic monoculture with as much relevance to today's raging technosphere as Walt's EPCOT or Roddenberry's Enterprise -- a flimsy, hermetic, cardboard future that substitutes over-allegorized cartoons for concrete historico-political analysis. To wit, in today's wired world, *Alphaville* is rather like a sugar-pill trying to fight cancer (read globalization), an over-ironized audiovisual strobe of kinaesthetically potent nothings. Godard never seems to get *past* Orwell, to say or do anything Orwell didn't already say and do better. Complacent, ivory-tower critics who persist in hailing *Alphaville* as "prophetic" are bluffing behind a weak hand, victims of a syndrome Lewis Mumford once called "the myth of the machine": a knee-jerk iconography of industrial monoliths, top-down hierarchies, concrete-and-steel quicksilver cosmopoli, gleaming white terra-cotta, ultra-noir culverts and back alleys, circuit-board labyrinths, lobotomized citizen-automata, Kafkan corridors of misdirection and telescoping distance.... Godard's film contributes to this secularist melodrama of centralized power, giving us solitary Lemmy Caution-like figures penetrating into the heart of vacuum-tubed mainframes, liberating all of humanity through a pistolwhipping Chandler-esque machismo. Even before the age of ubiquitous, non-centralized networks, things were *never* this simple. The "swarm intelligences" of modern capitalism make Godard's film something of a hokey, cheesy, laughable nonthreat. For today, the computational power of Godard's Alpha 60 has been subsumed by portable high-end laptops. Hacker subcultures of Kabbalistic programming-visionaries and radical biologists unleash their entrepreneurial insect-clouds of indie start-ups, and the nodal points and acupuncture meridians of Western tech-wealth become radically de-centralized. Godard must have known that true-blue globalization could never triumph if its customers were grinded down into cold, somnambulant, serotonin-deprived techno-drones. If the Alpha 60 did not allow us the fickle, insatiate, fluctuating palette of a poetic vocabulary, how could we be expected to *articulate* our myriad addictions to a toxic surplus of products and services? If we're not permitted to "think" and "feel," how can we conceptualize and poeticize our perverted need for more *stuff*? Godard's Alphavilleans don't seem to consume much of anything, champing the bit of an Eastern Bloc-style fascism as quaintly irrelevant as some dead-tech Byzantium. Laurie Anderson once remarked that Virtual Reality wouldn't look "really real" until the engineers learned to put some *dirt* into it. The motive behind "antiseptic" science-fiction of the Godardian cast (all gleaming orthogonal surfaces and industrial techno-mazes) is to allow the artist-auteur to foreground allegorical iconography against a glass-and-steel canvas of postmodern nothingness. In Godard's future, "logic" is the totemic overlord of a culture that has elevated science to the mutant edge of theocracy, brilliantly visualized through Godard's cinematic language (a perennial fetish for tenure-track academic code-breakers). But such visionary/symbolic foregrounding gives the lie to the squishy, dirty, fluxional, irascible hyper-minutiae that affords science-fiction its long-toothed visceral bite, its qualifying *worldliness*. Ergo, we cannot *enter bodily* the world of Alphaville any more than we can "enter" into a Piet Mondrian painting. The angles are too sharp, the allegories too thick, the personae too ornamental, the phantasmic aura too boiled-down and hypostasized. Big heavy cinderblocks of Metaphor. The American religion of cinematic *pyrotechnia* that Godard helped create and define (the paganized moving image coopting the ascetic, linear grammatology of we People of the Book) had stormed the citadel of Alphaville long before Lemmy Caution started pumping its functionaries full of lead. Many SF writers of the 1960s already understood that technological advancement is, at its far-flung mutant edge, too destabilizing a force to produce a Godardian future. The threat of nuclear devastation may have nihilized and benumbed us, brought Alphaville closer to the center of things, but the competitive techno-fervor that Sputnik ignited between East and West spawned the gooey, messy, paradigm-shattering waves of information technology that would transpose global power to the private sector. The "intelligence wars" between Russia and the U.S. are the quaintly antediluvian fossil-record to the economic and culture wars now being waged in virtual realities more byzantine than the mind of a Borgesian librarian after three cups of psilocybe tea. Godard's metaphors say nothing interesting or original about this society. It's all French-Fried Orwell, a tendentious art-house riff on Soviet-style infrastructures that no longer exist in the First World. Godard's hamfisted treatment of SF tropes is a permanent embarassment, an introverted quirkfest, a famously bad film that takes the poseur's road of cobbling together the trashy, desultory, pop-culture elements of the genre, with nary a breath of futurological fresh air to help remit our escalating future shock. Postmodern irony and comic-strip *bricolage* just doesn't cut it when you tout yourself as a "political" filmmaker. Godard's *Alphaville* is a crude anthology of faux-Orwellian logorrhea and slushy, maudlin swill about "logic" and "the human heart." A strange and appalling artifact.
Rating: 
Summary: Ultimate film for quintessential pseudos
Review: A silly, ugly, pretentious, inept, embarrassing, shallow, dreary film that was dated the day it was made.
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