Over 100 minutes of the most boring, pretentious, pointless film ever shot. Incomprehensible, muddling dialogue that sounds as if it was dictated by a drunken, homeless bum. Uninteresting, somnolent characters. Atrocious film editing, and a non-existent plot.
How DARE someone create a movie like this, and call it art? How DARE the dilletantes who give this pile of steaming cinematic offal five stars defend it?
The only film I can compare this to, in terms of utter pointlessness and sheer boredom- is the fifteen minutes of unexposed film that I accidentally fed into a projector back in my junior year of college.
The Emporer wears no clothes- and Alphaville needs to be consigned to the scrapheap of cinematic disasters, where it so richly deserves to lie, moldering and forgotten.

Curate a screening of Godard’s *Alphaville* for today’s Digerati. Snag as many technocrats, cognitive logicians, Kripkean analytical philosophers, MIT scions, and 80K-a-year knowledge-workers as you can. Solicit written responses, interview and exit-poll all participants, organize post-screening discussion forums and commission Internet listservs. Then collate and publish your results.

Will a single respondent feel threatened, unhinged, pressured, or destabilized by Godard’s film in any way? Will palms sweat? Will nerves twitch? Will pulse-rates tweak their median? Will personae jangle into self-scrutiny? More tellingly, will anyone identify *personally* with Von Braun, or the Tracheotomy 6000 supercomputer, or the starry-eyed meat puppets of Alphaville? Or would it be the pomo gunslinger Lemmy Caution who would centrifugally soak up the room’s empathic vibes?

As any Wired magazine subscriber knows, today’s technocrats perceive themselves as Byronic cyber-noir blade runners who shoot from the hip with the same stiff-lipped abandon as Eddie Constantine. They are, in effect, much closer to the alchemical thaumaturgy of Doc Faustus than the neurotic, pre-Wittgensteinian positivism on display in Godard’s profoundly silly, genre-slumming film.

*Alphaville* is not quite schlock — it is, rather, an artfully contrived, theoretically-riven visual artifact that models itself precariously on, well, schlock. Less a node of useful, psychosocial critique than a metaphor-laden Soviet theme-park of the hyperreal. For when played counterpoint to the culture is traduces, *Alphaville* reads like a closed parenthesis. A cryogenic monoculture with as much relevance to today’s raging technosphere as Walt’s EPCOT or Roddenberry’s Enterprise — a flimsy, hermetic, cardboard future that substitutes over-allegorized cartoons for concrete historico-political analysis. To wit, in today’s wired world, *Alphaville* is rather like a sugar-pill trying to fight cancer (read globalization), an over-ironized audiovisual strobe of kinaesthetically potent nothings.

Godard never seems to get *past* Orwell, to say or do anything Orwell didn’t already say and do better. Complacent, ivory-tower critics who persist in hailing *Alphaville* as “prophetic” are bluffing behind a weak hand, victims of a syndrome Lewis Mumford once called “the myth of the machine”: a knee-jerk iconography of industrial monoliths, top-down hierarchies, concrete-and-steel quicksilver cosmopoli, gleaming white terra-cotta, ultra-noir culverts and back alleys, circuit-board labyrinths, lobotomized citizen-automata, Kafkan corridors of misdirection and telescoping distance…. Godard’s film contributes to this secularist melodrama of centralized power, giving us solitary Lemmy Caution-like figures penetrating into the heart of vacuum-tubed mainframes, liberating all of humanity through a pistolwhipping Chandler-esque machismo. Even before the age of ubiquitous, non-centralized networks, things were *never* this simple. The “swarm intelligences” of modern capitalism make Godard’s film something of a hokey, cheesy, laughable nonthreat.

For today, the computational power of Godard’s Alpha 60 has been subsumed by portable high-end laptops. Hacker subcultures of Kabbalistic programming-visionaries and radical biologists unleash their entrepreneurial insect-clouds of indie start-ups, and the nodal points and acupuncture meridians of Western tech-wealth become radically de-centralized. Godard must have known that true-blue globalization could never triumph if its customers were grinded down into cold, somnambulant, serotonin-deprived techno-drones. If the Alpha 60 did not allow us the fickle, insatiate, fluctuating palette of a poetic vocabulary, how could we be expected to *articulate* our myriad addictions to a toxic surplus of products and services? If we’re not permitted to “think” and “feel,” how can we conceptualize and poeticize our perverted need for more *stuff*? Godard’s Alphavilleans don’t seem to consume much of anything, champing the bit of an Eastern Bloc-style fascism as quaintly irrelevant as some dead-tech Byzantium.

Laurie Anderson once remarked that Virtual Reality wouldn’t look “really real” until the engineers learned to put some *dirt* into it. The motive behind “antiseptic” science-fiction of the Godardian cast (all gleaming orthogonal surfaces and industrial techno-mazes) is to allow the artist-auteur to foreground allegorical iconography against a glass-and-steel canvas of postmodern nothingness. In Godard’s future, “logic” is the totemic overlord of a culture that has elevated science to the mutant edge of theocracy, brilliantly visualized through Godard’s cinematic language (a perennial fetish for tenure-track academic code-breakers). But such visionary/symbolic foregrounding gives the lie to the squishy, dirty, fluxional, irascible hyper-minutiae that affords science-fiction its long-toothed visceral bite, its qualifying *worldliness*. Ergo, we cannot *enter bodily* the world of Alphaville any more than we can “enter” into a Piet Mondrian painting. The angles are too sharp, the allegories too thick, the personae too ornamental, the phantasmic aura too boiled-down and hypostasized. Big heavy cinderblocks of Metaphor.

The American religion of cinematic *pyrotechnia* that Godard helped create and define (the paganized moving image coopting the ascetic, linear grammatology of we People of the Book) had stormed the citadel of Alphaville long before Lemmy Caution started pumping its functionaries full of lead. Many SF writers of the 1960s already understood that technological advancement is, at its far-flung mutant edge, too destabilizing a force to produce a Godardian future. The threat of nuclear devastation may have nihilized and benumbed us, brought Alphaville closer to the center of things, but the competitive techno-fervor that Sputnik ignited between East and West spawned the gooey, messy, paradigm-shattering waves of information technology that would transpose global power to the private sector. The “intelligence wars” between Russia and the U.S. are the quaintly antediluvian fossil-record to the economic and culture wars now being waged in virtual realities more byzantine than the mind of a Borgesian librarian after three cups of psilocybe tea.

Godard’s metaphors say nothing interesting or original about this society. It’s all French-Fried Orwell, a tendentious art-house riff on Soviet-style infrastructures that no longer exist in the First World. Godard’s hamfisted treatment of SF tropes is a permanent embarassment, an introverted quirkfest, a famously bad film that takes the poseur’s road of cobbling together the trashy, desultory, pop-culture elements of the genre, with nary a breath of futurological fresh air to help remit our escalating future shock.

Postmodern irony and comic-strip *bricolage* just doesn’t cut it when you tout yourself as a “political” filmmaker. Godard’s *Alphaville* is a crude anthology of faux-Orwellian logorrhea and slushy, maudlin swill about “logic” and “the human heart.” A strange and appalling artifact.

A silly, ugly, pretentious, inept, embarrassing, shallow, dreary film that was dated the day it was made.