Alphaville Movie Review

While private eye Lemmy Caution has ventured all the way to another planet to visit the futuristic Alphaville, it certainly looks a lot like Paris. And what are the odds that they'll speak French, huh?

Jean-Luc Godard's oddball sci-fi spends a lot of time ostensibly bemoaning the dehumanizing effects of technology but doesn't make much of a case for it here. Sure, if we were dumb enough to literally allow a computer to rule our lives, we might get what we deserved. But modern life (and even reasonably forseeable life) has no signs of Godard's "outlawing of emotion" and oppression of individuality. In fact, these ideas are more prevalent than ever, which tends to horribly date Alphaville against its more thought-out successors like A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner.

And not a word of French among them, either!

Based in part on the book La Capitale de la Douleur.

Aka Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution.