Way ahead of its time. A special film, with good performances. A little poetry in cinema.

One of the main films that inspired me to unroll in film school and learn more about the art of filmmaking

Very strange ¿sci-fi? film. The dialogue, the scenes, the sequences, everything.... But then I remember... It's a Godard film, so it's ok.

Sea como sea, aún cuando unos cuantos no sepan qué pasa en la trama, tiene bien ganado su status, a base de dar una nueva cara al género noir-policiaco, y convertirse en escuela para las futuras generaciones. Una de las que no hay que dejar escapar.

Very Godard. And not in the 𝘉𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦 𝘈' 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦, 𝘉𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 or 𝘝𝘪𝘷𝘳𝘦 𝘚𝘢 𝘝𝘪𝘦 sense. But in those films where meaning and themes seem to blur amid so much symbolism, imagery-laden dialogue/voice-over, that the results are overly nebulous or arbitrary for me. As a political allegory with some sci-fi elements, it's visually striking and captivating in its first half before the film gets too didactic in the final third. Alphaville is challenging in places and thematically familiar in others. 𝘈𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦 is challenging in places and thematically familiar in others. But I also found it tedious and a bit repetitive. Funny how in all the reviews I've checked out for the movie, no one has mentioned how women are portrayed and treated. Or is that just expcted and par-for-the-course in noir flicks? I did appreciate Constantine's and Karina 's performances. 3.2 stars

Having fallen asleep more than once trying to watch this oddly static movie, this time I stayed with it through the end by paying attention to its many references to the mid-1960s milieu. Godard wants to quickly lay down his ideas of the moment and throws together movies to illustrate them with little planning and improvised dialogue. When he is working with lively young actors like Belmondo in a freewheeling film like Breathless, his improvisatory approach works well. But not in Alphaville, which portrays a locked-down dystopian world where showing emotion is punishable by death, and its star Eddie Constantine is locked into the stone faced Lemmy Caution tough-guy character from his 1950s detective flics. Here Godard is imitating his mentor Jean-Pierre Melville's film noir style, but very badly. Melville, an independent filmmaker always strapped for money, famously cut corners by using hand-held cameras for street shots and minimal sets, but he carefully thought out each scene and his films are full of arresting visuals. Godard often seems to take a bunch of random shots for a scene and slaps something together in the editing room. He cares more about his ideas and words than what we see on the screen, which doesn't make sense for a visual medium like film. And those ideas seem rather quaint today. Godard is reacting to the 1960s mania for ‘modernizing' everything plus Cold War era fears of authoritarian governments stealing our humanity from us, but by the 21st century the real danger has turned out to be corporate control of us as consumers and worker clones. And then Godard's answer to society's dehumanization is poetry, still a thing in 1965 but now sadly outmoded as an art form that matters. Alphaville has some historical value as a snapshot of mid-1960s fears, but it is not great art.

Godard sets up a futuristic noir with technology and logic as the new gods, mortal consequences for disagreement, and with only one weakness: hardboiled American agent Lemmy Caution. In the first few minutes, he infiltrates this dystopian, retrofuturistic world before an attempted passionless seduction and a frenzied attack by an assassin, setting up questions about his character, circumstances, and purpose, before diving into an empty pool with explanations. Alphaville plays out like some sort of mildly entertaining version of an Ayn Rand novel, where celebrations of the individual are literally so profound as to defeat the world's most powerful supercomputer, which has optimized everyday life to the extent that it robs existence of all enjoyment and purpose. Personal expression and creativity are seen as the vanquishers of cold logic in an surprisingly childish overall plot that lets Constantine's Caution behave as the most obvious spy of all time being pursued by a particularly unmotivated police department. Witness as this hero shows poetry to a brainwashed woman to allow her to understand love, whoopee. Compared to the many other novels and films that have equated technological advancement and the loss of the self, Alphaville is both poorly conceived and remarkably dull for a film, particularly one whose working title as per the director was 'Tarzan versus IBM'; it just happens to have Godard's name attached to it to keep it hanging around. (2/5)

Alphaville, or The Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution, is some sort of weird hybrid of French New Wave cinema, dystopian science fiction, and American film noir. Probably the most un-Godard-like of all Jean-Luc Godard's films, it follows the story of Lemmy Caution, a secret agent from the Outlands, who travels to Alphaville to destroy Alpha 60, the dictatorial computer that runs Alphaville. It's full of genuine weirdness, including the executions of those who show emotion – they are shot off diving boards and then stabbed to death by synchronized swimmers. The movie is visually beautiful and narratively engaging at times, but is also perplexing and frustratingly pretentious elsewhere, including the absurd and laughable final ten minutes.

I didn't expect to laugh so much! I didn't realize until after watching that the protagonist, Lemmy Caution, was a stock character in French B-grade detective movies of the time who played on European fascination and revulsion towards a certain American, cinematic «type». So, Godard was exaggerating and playing with the trope of Caution, who would be very familiar to his audience. Without knowing that, some of the absurdity of his role felt anachronistic and bizarre, but I have been rethinking since what the movie is doing. On a superficial level, this is a a version of the mid-century anxiety about totalitarian creep in all kinds of societies – regulated forms of capitalism and socialism. 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are obvious parallels. I thought of Star Trek TOS too – the opposition between logic and emotion, what's right for the greater good vs. what feels right in the gut – as well a futuristic society that features more extreme objectification of women. The hotel clerk who comes in with a new Bible ... er, dictionary ... every day was a nice touch. Of course the broader themes of Alphaville are very much with us now, liberalism shading towards totalitarian control. The filmic anxiety about scientific dominance is striking, here, in the midst of the pandemic. Then, the «forms» of totalitarian control today look and feel almost nothing like this movie, which is prescient in one way, absurdly, unintentionally dated in others, and stripped down in a way that could feel symbolic or inappropriate. There's nothing at all here of the habitus we have come to associate with surveillance creep: no cameras or visible apparatus of control. Very few guards to watch this clearly suspicious outlander in Alphaville. One agent tries to kill Caution in his hotel room (but Caution shoots him, instead); a suspicious-looking fellow spies on a phone call, and Caution knifes him. There's no obvious accountability for this or swarm of police, leading to this strange, soupy feeling: are we in a police state or a hollowed out, futuristic, vaguely post-apocalyptic wild west? He goes where he pleases and only occasionally is yanked into a bureaucratic morass. Then it becomes clear that yes, he was sort of at least being watched the whole time. He is subjected to an interrogation which seems to be more of an absurd, existential effort at placing him within a psychological typology than an effort to extract information or confession. The computer is, of course, a great big room in the center of town and nowhere else. It turns out that the computer was using lines from Borges! I didn't catch it until reading about it later. Funny. And again, this makes me rethink what Godard was doing ... it makes it obvious that it is not meant to sound like a "real" or plausible interrogation.

This is a bizarre movie, both serious and playful, part dystopian science fiction, part noir crime adventure, and part romance. Halfway through I did think about Blade Runner, and I'm sure that in its day Alphaville was the subject of many earnest film classes and serious arguments at cocktail parties. More importantly for our generation, the film's premonition of a data-driven dystopian world is somehow becoming a reality and that alone makes it worth the watch.

Though conceptually well thought through, the movie is pretty much heavily structured and the cinematic language is rather demanding.

Weird pretentious junk

Imagine a French mashup of Dick Tracy and Brave New World and you've got this film. And I don't mean that in a good way. There's nothing this film can tell you that Brave New World or 1984 couldn't tell you in a better and more meaningful way.

The kindest that I can say is that it aged tremendously bad, and I stop here because it would be disrespectful to add anything.

This film is so unfulfilling in its story, so dull in atmosphere, and lame in script that the best I can give it is down the middle. Even with a limited budget Godard could have at least tried to make it feel like sci-fi, but no. He can't even make a good noir. There is okie-dokie satire and I don't mind the changing of tones but this film is just horribly uninteresting.

I like the Film Noir aspects of this, and the dystopian idea of it...but I really had trouble staying into the film.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film "Alphaville" stars Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, an American private eye sent to the city in space to destroy Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a computer that rules the city and that has outlawed emotions, love and poetry. It's a science fiction noir that has the look and feel of Hollywood noir films, but ultimately, it's just a rough film to get into.

An interesting mix of film noir and science fiction, Godard pulls out all the stops in this visual piece of art. Having honestly not seen anything like this before, there are elements of it that have been imitated since (like in "Brazil" (1985) and "Birdman" (2014)) that just shows how groundbreaking this film was for its time.

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.

Interesting, but confusingly told by symbolic images and words. The deep voice was annoying. Props for making a futuristic noir sci fi without trying to create a different time or sets. 1001 movies to see before you die.