Review: Alphaville (1965)
Jean-Luc Godard's future noir is opaque, obtuse, and at times flat-out tedious. It's also extremely ambitious and filled with ideas that have aged so well that the film feels more relevant than ever before. When secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives in the space city of Alphaville, it looks and feels just like 1965 Paris. Instead of a ray gun and an elaborate communicator, he has a pistol and a cigarette lighter, which serve the same purposes. No doubt Godard was making the most out of the materials and locations he had on hand to keep this modestly-budgeted film affordable, but was he also commenting on the world of the mid-sixties and its jet-powered, atomic-fueled progress? Either way, the cinematography of mid-sixties Paris by Raoul Coutard is breathtaking. In the film, a super computer named Alpha 60 has weeded out all undesirable qualities of life by turning the citizens into mindless automatons. Those who stray from the group think or show any emotion, ...