Pretty Good

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film ALPHAVILLE has one of the most bizarre premises in the history of cinema. Godard borrows the character of Lemmy Caution, a tough FBI agent/secret agent played by Eddie Constantine that had appeared in a number of French B movies, and then Godard drops Caution into a science-fiction film. And yet, this film taking place in a different galaxy far, far away doesn't use any specially created sets or fancy ray guns. Instead, Godard simply shot the film at examples of modernist architecture in Paris, in industrial buildings, and among the room-sized IBM mainframe computers of his time.In the dystopian city of Alphaville, all decisions are made by the gigantic Alpha 60 computer that pursues logic at all cost, banning human emotions and leaving the inhabitants zombified. Caution is sent from outside with the task of retrieving Alpha 60's creator, the rogue scientist Von Braun (Howard Vernon). Caution's femme fatale is Natasha Von Braun (Anna Karina), daughter of the scientist, whom she has never met. Though zombified like the other inhabitants of Alphaville, Natasha shows a budding individuality. Caution is baffled by the inexplicable behavior shown by the inhabitants of this city, but he remains focused on his goal to extracting Von Braun, no matter how many obstacles are thrown in his way.ALPHAVILLE is often categorized as a science-fiction film, but it's soon obvious that Godard was interested more in the changing world around him in the 1960s. He worried that the technocratic society, the desire to use technology to solve all manner of problems from food distribution to architecture, would rob the human race of a certain flexibility, of a certain liberty, and of a certain poetry. (It's interesting that Godard anticipated so much of the Sixties counterculture that would preoccupy the youth, though he was already well into his thirties, and themes that would later be explored by thinkers like Theodore Roszak.) Alpha 60 is less a vision of the far future, something from a time of intergalactic space travel, than a rising trend of the mid 20th-century.I had heard of the premise and much of the details before and I thought the film would be lame, but I absolutely loved it. I came to ALPHAVILLE after watching Godard's work to date, which features some remarkable imagery and avant-garde techniques, but is rarely very comedic. I had no idea that ALPHAVILLE would be so hilarious. As the film opens, we see Godard playing with the trope of the hardboiled detective or spy overcoming assassins sent to kill him, and this is exaggerated to the point it becomes slapstick. There are a lot of absurdist touches here, from a mass execution using bizarre methods (and where's the blood?) to the peculiar way our hero is at one point incapacitated by some goons sent to bring him to the feet of the villain.The performances here are great, too. In spite of the unusual script, which might have had some actors blowing off the director's concerns, Eddie Constantine unflappably maintains his noir style here. Akim Tamiroff turns in a great supporting role as Caution's fellow agent Dickson, and this already elderly actor brings in a lifetime of experience in comedic roles. Karina continues to show that, while Godard was originally interested in her merely as a pretty face, she had enormous talent. Some of the long shots are cleverly done, and the film includes an exciting car chase.

I am really afraid to say anything negative about this film, given the incredibly low level of critique demonstrated by the people here who didn't like it, but...I have never thought that this was anywhere near the best of his '60s films. But I jumped at the chance to see it on the big screen again yesterday. I hoped to revise my opinion. Which I did not.People who do not understand why the Paris of the moment when the film was made is used to represent a future dystopia should be condemned to never watching a film outside of the Mainstream ever again. The point is blindingly obvious: dystopia is all around us. Using music and lighting and camera movement to represent that, rather than relying on triumphantly gaudy and expensive production design, shows that Godard is a filmmaker down to the tips of his toes. He learned so much from the American directors who had no recourse to expensive sets and had to use shadows and fog...I'm thinking of Lang on Man Hunt, Mann on G - Men. Of course, Ulmer on Detour, etc.All this is amazing. And there are great set pieces (the swimming pool, for example). And the use of the same couple of bars of music, over and over, is great, too.Look, I don't need to believe in the relationships and the ideas in Godard films in order to enjoy them. Karina and Constantine was perhaps a very inspired mismatch. And I've read and studied lots of Brecht. But Alphaville just doesn't SWING for me the way most of the others from this time do. But, you know what? I'm going to watch it again.

Great plot and idea. Poor visuals due to early years of production. Very weak actors (in my opinion).AND THE MOST ANNOYING- DISTURBING- DISGUSTING-GURGLING-WOBBLING NARRATOR COMPUTER VOICE EVER. It almost destroyed my poor ears during film watching. But luckily, i survived. Sound effects and music design is miserable too, considering the main theme of the movie. Story line of video-film is V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W and have no dynamic scenes at all, but this is common stuff for 60s, 70s movies.Hoping, that Brazil (1985) with similar storyline will be far better! Can't say anything more.

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.