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One of the least energetic of Godard’s New Wave films, Alphaville nonetheless evinces his puckish wit and allusive modernism... At its heart, though, the film’s tension between emotion and logic epitomizes the early internal conflict of intellectualism and love that suffuses Godard’s early work.

Godard's film has the makings of a retro classic—with elements of noir and a trench coat-sporting, Bogartesque Eddie Constantine as its lead, detective Lemmy Caution—but it's set in a dystopian future run by a tyrannical machine called Alpha 60. Though this is a science-fiction film, Godard isn't interested in flashy special effects, instead playing in the dramatic light and shadows captured by the late, great cinematographer Raoul Coutard.

For all its populism, the action is also packed with learned allusions to Cocteau, Kafka and the myths of Eurydice and Lot's wife. Such is Godard's genius that these highbrow references never overwhelm the pulp and that the disposable is prevented from trivialising the valuable - unlike in Alphaville or, unfortunately, our own dumbed-down times.

Alphaville – the product of this debate – is a deeply stylish and alluring film which flatters the viewer's taste and appreciation for modern design; we are reminded of Anna Karina's descent, wearing a chic black fur-trimmed robe, down a spiralling marble staircase; the echoing white, gold, and glass auditorium of a central hotel. We see the presence of cars, radios, televisions, screens, as if Godard had constructed the mise-en-scene from a collage of marketing brochures and advertising copy.

As is typical of Godard’s early work, the story is a pretext for an investigation of a variety of artistic, philosophical and political issues, including the nature and function of art, the power of language and the relation of ideology and culture – issues that came increasingly to the fore as Godard’s career grew more overtly political in the late 1960s.

For Godard, whose marriage to actress Karina was coming apart at the time, “Alphaville” was in part about the importance of love and human connection in a world where technology was warping interpersonal contact.

What really matters is the atmosphere, rife with ominous shadows (courtesy ace DP Raoul Coutard, turning Paris circa 1965 into an ultra-convincing dystopia) and populated by those two quintessential Godard elements: girls and guns.

...Looking at [Alphaville] again, it's ever more clearly a genre-art-film lab explosion: equal parts referential film noir, dystopian sci-fi, Godardian self-referentiality, unstable espionage thriller, genre satire, Melvillian-Beckettian existentialism, meditation on proto-semiotic "rupture," and so on. Still, the miraculous thing about Alphaville is how it mediates the tension between its radical postmod aesthetic approach and its genre elements.

A savvy, if masterfully economical recruitment of form as receptacle for philosophical inquiry, Godard nevertheless refined a lexicon for subsequent big-budgeted, high-concept offspring (Soylent Green, Blade Runner, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey). It's only fitting then that in its offhanded, thrift-store approach Alphaville is still cooler, stranger, and more prescient than them all.

A love letter to expressionism and pulp—which like every Godardian love letter contains no small amount of criticism—ALPHAVILLE is alternatively off-putting in its esotericism and accessible in its broad and familiar genre gestures; and its groundbreaking work demonstrating that the future is always located just a little bit behind us cannot be undervalued.

As in Antonioni's The Red Desert (made the previous year), Godard's theme is alienation in a technological society, but his shotgun marriage between the poetry of legend and the irreverence of strip cartoons takes the film into entirely idiosyncratic areas.

There is an exhilarating release in many of the images and camera movements because of Godard's uncanny ability to evoke privileged moments from many movies of the past.