Alphaville

Saw Alphaville, a very definitive-feeling dystopia film directed by Godard. It's very boiler-plate by this point: secret agent Lemmy Caution must assassinate the scientist-leader of the computer-controlled Alphaville. This futuristic city is so emotionless that women mostly are employed as walking sex-bots (it's actually unclear if they are meant to be literally robots in fact.) The population is so thought-controlled, they refer to the dictionary as the Bible and do not know words like "conscience." They are so isolated, they refer to other cities as "galaxies." They are so backward that nodding means no and shaking one's head means yes. Sometimes the film negative is shown, the entire city is so inverted.

So, this is very visually creative, but the theme is kind of old-hat by now. It's science vs art, once more. This is silly for a few reasons, not least of which is that under a dystopia propaganda would presumably still be needed. Also, of course this was in reaction to the nukes of the 40s and 50s, when the horrified general public decided that science had evidently lost sight of it humanity. This is a recurrent issue to this day however, so I can't be too dismissive (although I really do think this is a false dilemma. Let's just work together, okay?)

The central horror of the dystopia shown here however is supposed to be its inevitability. I can kind of get behind this. I have personally given up an elements of my privacy and autonomy for the sake of convenience, so I think I would be one of the ant-people the protagonist scorns. Then again, this has nothing to do with the film.

The film is visually creative and the evil computer-mastermind is very novel (it speaks exclusively in rumbling bump-like noises. It sounds a lot like the dialogue in Papers Please.) The plot is a bit done by this point, but this film is quite early as the dystopia genre goes, so this may be the original document that everyone cribbed wildly off of. I found the film a bit boring but then I've been working my way through a list of dystopian movies and I'm also quite tired. I fear Godard is consistently getting the better of me. I find his work nigh-on impenetrable and often kind of dull. Well, let this be yet another reminder that I'm just a pretend-reviewer.