Dani G
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.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
03/29/24
Full Review
Alejandro E
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.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
03/01/24
Full Review
Kevin L
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
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
09/05/23
Full Review
CKB
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.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
06/29/23
Full Review
William L
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)
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
07/13/21
Full Review
dave s
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.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
Full Review
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