Alphaville (1965)

In Alphaville you get the death penalty by women stabbing you in a swimming pool for behaving illogically.
Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.
Alpha 60 is a vast computer that decides everything even what people think down to what to do and say. In the end they get completely lost and can not think for themselves. Alpha 60 talks like a man with throat cancer speaking through one of the speaking devices.

I do wonder how the French think that putting seemingly random ideas together makes sense.

Her name was Beatrice. She said she was a seductress, third class. I was struck by the sadness and durability of her face. Something's not in orbit in the capital of this Galaxy.
Seems they just don't like technology much.

-I see. People have become slaves of probabilities.
+Their ideal here, in Alphaville is a technocracy, like that of termites and ants.
-I don't understand.
+Probably one hundred and fifty light years ago. One hundred and fifty, two hundred there were artists in the ant society. Artists, novelists, musicians, painters. Today no more.

While showing a slide of a scale in balance with ! and ? the following was spoken:
Is it not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well-being?

In Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard fuses a hardboiled detective story with science fiction. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a hero Godard borrowed from a series of French adventure films, comes to Alphaville, the capital of a totalitarian state, in order to destroy its leader, an almost-human computer called Alpha 60. While on his mission, Lemmy meets and falls in love with Natacha (Anna Karina), the daughter of the scientist who designed Alpha 60. Their love becomes the most profound challenge to the computer's control. Void of any flashy special effects, Alphaville uses 1960s Paris to depict the city of the future. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

Running Time: 99 mins

Alphaville (1965)

So overall an interesting film but I unfortunately fail to see some of the hidden messages. Like when Mr. Caution goes around with a little cheap mechanical flash camera to take pictures of some people. Also only the women have bar codes on them (various body locations). I think only one lady I did not see the tattooed numbers.

Alphaville (film)

Alpha 60 outlaws free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because'." People who show signs of emotion (weeping at the death of a wife, or a smile on the face) are presumed to be acting illogically, and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. In an image reminiscent of George Orwell's concept of Newspeak, there is a "Bible" in each room: actually a dictionary that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society of mindless drones - many the apparent victim of re-education campaigns by Alpha 60 that are implicitly reminiscent of Nazism and Communism.

The film does lose the sound in certain scenes and only playing the music or complete silence.
Thus rating: 3.5 (/5)

La Capitale de la Douleur (The Capital of Pain)