Oliver Matheson’s review published on Letterboxd:
“It was my first night in Alphaville, but it felt like I’d been there for centuries”
Effective in immediately setting a tone with its jarring opening and terrific use of music and camerawork. All we need to see is our protagonist, Lemmy Caution, light a cigarette in a dark car, his hardened face lit exquisitely, and we’re off to the races baby.
Plot…plot…I’m not sure there is a plot here, if there is I missed it (kidding…mostly). The film follows Caution to the distant planet of Alphaville on a quest to kill the planet's leader who deprives his people of love and emotion. Along the way he meets that leader's daughter, played by Anna Karina. At this point it is hard to describe Karina as an actor, she has transcended that description and become pure icon, transforming any scene she’s in into an iconic image. Here she uses her natural naïveté and innocence to bring a level of creepiness to her performance that is startlingly effective.
Raoul Coutard's camerawork makes great use of each location, forgoing quick cuts with long takes where the camera constantly rotates and tracks the characters on screen. Contains themes reminiscent of Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, but instead of a nuclear family the brainwashing is applied to an entire planet, where words are commonly erased from the Alphaville Bible (what we would call a dictionary). On the surface this a world without love or poetry, but because this is firmly a Godard film where style always trumps substance, we don’t feel like we’re in the fictional planet of Alphaville as much as we are in a world of closeups and shadows.
Godard crafts lingering imagery out of simple settings, from swimming pools to hallways. Setting a science fiction film in every day locations is an ambitious feat, but Godard pulls it off with style.