ecret Agent Lemmy Caution (Constantine) is a man on a mission. Having driven to Alphaville from the Outlands through "intersiderial space" in his Ford Jet Galaxy, he checks into a hotel as Ivan Johnson, a journalist with Figaro-Pravda. He's shown to his room by a "Seductress, Third Class," whose automatonic come-ons he bats away, explaining, "I can get my own dames."
Caution's assignment is to seek out missing fellow-agent Henri Dixon (Tamiroff), get what information he can from him, and move on to his main targets: the mysterious Professor von Braun (Vernon) and Alpha 60, the super-computer that runs the city of Alphaville.
What Lemmy finds isn't a pretty picture. Dixon is a worn-out old man who's been broken by the city, a city that runs and is ruled strictly by logic, where emotion is being eradicated from human affairs, where public executions are bizarrely-staged social events, and where words like "love" and "conscience" are being written out of the language.
Caution eventually finds himself being escorted through Alphaville by von Braun's fetching daughter, Natascha (Karina), and, through various meetings and interrogations, engages in a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the professor (who, apparently, was once an "Outlander" himself by the name of Leonard Nosferatu) and Alpha 60. But Caution may have the upper hand, for not only is he undoing the programming that has a grip on Natascha with his own brand of brutish wooing, but he may also have the key to undoing Alpha 60--poetry. Professor von Braun is another matter, however; Caution may just have to kill him.
View with extreme Caution
Made in the midst of the French New Wave of cinema, Alphaville is more a Godard film than a science fiction film, and viewers not accustomed to either the director or the movement of which he was a part may be in for a shock or disappointment.
Alphaville doesn't really have any special effects or futuristic props. Caution's space-traveling vehicle is just a car, and most of the locations are modern Parisian buildings, which, while effective in establishing the feel of a sterile, emotionless world, look like the office spaces they are. Alphaville is revealed as SF primarily through dialogue, its only otherworldly or futuristic element being the presence and voice of Alpha 60, played by a man who's had his larynx removed.
But Godard both pays homage to and pokes fun at the conventions of the genres he explores--hard-boiled detective stories, science fiction, and film noir. Lemmy Caution is very much a stock character, an over-the-top, hard-boiled, pulp fiction type, never hesitating to use his fists or his gun to solve a problem quick and easy. Throw elements of surrealist poetry and classical mythology into the movie and it makes quite an interesting mix. However, it doesn't necessarily make for the easiest or most entertaining viewing.
In some ways Alphaville is very effective as science fiction: in its capacity to challenge the audience to imagine the world of the story, as well as in its capacity to talk to the audience more about their present than their future. These strengths are this film's weaknesses, however. Sometimes the narrative feels too choppy and too much rooted in the present, and the movie as a whole seems dated. Nor does Alphaville really have anything terribly original to say within the SF genre, even as it existed at the time the film was made. Though that's probably not the point, either.
