Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Sammy-Jo Cervantes There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

higherall7 This is a delightful mix of Film Noir and Science Fiction. Better in so many ways than BLADERUNNER, and excels in atmosphere without any special props or futuristic sets. Eddie Constantine is pitch perfect as Lemmy Caution, secret agent 003 posing as Ivan Dixon and recently arrived in the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville. He is on a mission to find a fellow agent who has gone rogue, to neutralize Professor von Braun, the architect of Alphaville and to rescue Natasha von Braun with emotion, love and poetry.These are the very things that the computer overlord Alpha 60 has outlawed along with free thought and individualism. We watch Caution carry out his assignments with a deadpan, no nonsense reserve. While he moves through the dystopian world of Alphaville, the computerized voice of Alpha 60 with its television eyes everywhere serves also as the narrator of all the proceedings. But our hero Caution fights his mechanical adversary with jabs of verse as Alpha 60 helplessly photographs the messy violent acts that 003 commits that defies and short circuits the collectivized logic of Alphaville.This is cinema with all the crudeness of a real independent film. It is surprisingly literate right from the start, referencing Jean Cocteau's 1950 film ORPHEUS. At its core, it champions what true science fiction should be; a triumph of human values over technological hardware and gadgetry. The Film Noir elements are all seamlessly blended with ideas that are fascinatingly presented in Caution's confrontation with Alpha 60. They become engaged in a battle of wits that ends with the secret agent posing a riddle to the talking mechanical brain that confounds its computerized community reasoning.The miracle is how director Jean-Luc Godard can do so much with so little. He has no such resources as Industrial Light and Magic and yet plainly demonstrates that he does not need them. He resorts to the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges and allies his hero with Natasha who slowly awakens to the possibilities of free emotion in love as unpredictable and irrational as this may prove to be. There is indeed something about Caution's anachronistic presence in this dystopic wonderland that somehow throws its citizens out of synch with his mission objectives.There is no mention of the myth David and Goliath and yet the contest between Caution and Alpha 60 can easily be seen in this light. Alpha 60 is the giant that is all-knowing with eyes everywhere and the story is told according to his viewpoint. Lemmy Caution armed with no more than a camera, human fists, a gun and a book of poetry takes on the megalithic might of this mechanical being. A classic case of Man versus the Machine and the System. But in the end, beyond the camera, headlocks and punches, bullets and blinding flashes of verse there comes three little words that provide the payoff.'Je vous aime' and we are cruising back into the Outlands...

Mahmood-Buttrumps Now we have a movie that has the look of the old Twilight Zone movies created by Rod Serling. This might have been good for a late 1950's movies but today the look is much different especially for "Star Trek and "Star Wars". Remember Jean-Luc Godard can be very cerebral.He doesn't specialize in Science Fiction. That's why there isn't the action one expects to find. Cerebral films usually appeal to the critics but not to the average person.I could not give the film more than a 9.5 star rating. See the film and form your own opinions.

Christopher Culver 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.

valadas Definitively I and Jean-Luc Godard don't get along with each other in what concerns films and filming. I didn't like any of his films I have seen previously and didn't like this one either. What does it mean and what does he want to communicate or say to us in all his films? Is he serious or is he just kidding with crime or science-fi or even love stories? Does he want to pass on any message to us? Which is it? I am not so stupid but if he is considered one of the best movie directors of our times by most responsible critics maybe the fault is mine. This movie takes place in Alphaville, a supposed extraterrestrial town in some exterior galaxy but that looks like any current town or city in this world like New York or Paris for instance, peopled by apparently normal people normally dressed. Some scenes are quite ordinary, some dialogues too but some others show very odd behaviours and incoherent talking. You travel out of the galaxy by car and by road for instance. Which codes and symbols is Godard recurring to? He once said: To make a movie we only need a gun and a woman. Is this the answer maybe?