Alphaville

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…

Ivan Caution explores the dystopian Alphaville where the only truth is logic, anything else is punishable by death. Everybody is popping pills, womenn are classes by their seductive level and the men are merely puppets to the computer Alpha 60. The plot is strangely reminiscent of today, almost in a predictive fashion. It seems to be influenced by 1984 but it doesn’t do so in a repetitive or tiring manner. Moreover the film is really refreshing. Shots that simply don’t happen anymore. The story although basically similar to many movies, doesn’t seem that predicable and I wasn’t dreading the…