© 2006 William Ahearn

Jean-Luc Godard is the most seminal of the directors that formed France’s New Wave in the 1960s. He’s one of my favorite writer/directors and so I was looking forward to seeing “Alphaville” again. It’s been decades since I had seen it and my memory of it had faded but I did remember there was a computer in there somewhere.

“Alphaville” is the only example of cinema cyber hardboiled that comes to mind. It is the story of Lemmy Caution, an intergalactic spy, who arrives undercover in Alphaville as Ivan Johnson, a correspondent for Figaro-Pravda. Caution’s mission is to capture or kill Leonard van Braun, who escaped to Alphaville from the Outlands after changing his name from Nosferatu. But von Braun is part of the elite who maintains Alpha 60, the computer that has created and runs the civilization. It is a place where people are executed for being illogical or live as “slaves of probability.”

The film opens with a flashing light and the voice of Alpha 60: “Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.”

Produced on a budget that wouldn’t cover the cost of lunch for “The Matrix” or “2001” technical crews, “Alphaville” was shot on location in the streets of Paris without any special effects, space helmets, ray guns or silly uniforms. As a result, it seems to say that the future is now or is contained in the now. Of all the films in this series, Alphaville is the most bizarre and the concepts touched upon in it have spun out to influence almost every major computer-centric film that followed it. It is in this film that the computer is more than a calculator or an electronic brain. In “Alphaville,” it is the computer itself that must be feared. Alpha 60 not only has a voice, it has a plan based on its supposed superior intellect to save humanity from itself and it is intent on creating a new consciousness in humans by, among other things, manipulating the language. The Orwellian influence is obvious and it produces nice little touches such as the Bible in the hotel room is not the Gideon Bible but a common dictionary that needs to be constantly replaced as words are banned and disappear.

Conversations between computers – evil or otherwise – and characters in movies became all too commonplace after “Alphaville,” but the confrontation between Alpha 60, a malevolent entity bent on controlling destiny and Lemmy Caution, a spy with the soul of a poet, has never been equaled or even attempted.

“Alphaville” is the only computer film with a malevolent mainframe that doesn’t hesitate to have some fun. The movie is a literate, non-literal, genre-bending strange adventure that changed the future of computer movies.

And once Jean-Luc Godard gave computers a voice and an agenda, no one could shut them up.