The first film by Jean-Luc Godard to be released by the Criterion Collection, in a no-extras copy that begs for a future two-disc special edition, this altogether bizarre proto sci-fi is notable only, to me anyway, for the way in which Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard manipulate light and photography to turn nighttime Paris into a futuristic netherworld of impersonal glass structures, monotonous computers, and robotic humans devoid of form, function, or personality. The film, about a detective (Eddie Constantine) who infiltrates the totalitarian Alphaville, run by an omnipresent computer, to extricate a professor (Howard Vernon), is a baffling, and often impossible mixture of Godard’s politics and his radical examination of human interaction in spite of war and technology (the final shot of Anna Karina, in close up, saying “I You Love”, is about as self reflexive and pretentious as Godard got), and even though the concept is intriguing, and Coutard’s photography is groundbreaking, the film ultimately doesn’t add up to anything close to comprehension.