"City Alpha" is a feature film created in 1965 by the New Wave "Cinema Manual" director Jean-Luc Godard. This is a purely original film. Compared with the successful adaptation of "Dike" and the classic original work of "Fahrenheit 451", it may be more unpopular among the mainstream audience of sci-fi movies.
The film depicts an icy future city: the residents living here are all ruthless and loveless, and everything is ruled under "logic" by the supercomputer "Alpha 60". The story revolves around a spy from the Outer Countries, who leads the audience to know Alpha City from his perspective.
Obviously, "Alpha City" and "Fahrenheit 451" belong to the same dystopian genre. But unlike the relatively popular "Fahrenheit 451", the temperament of "Alpha City" is closer to "Dike". In other words, it's another movie with a sense of alienation everywhere.
A certain powerful force dominates - "Alpha 60", the social system is extremely rigid - "logic" is above everything, there are rule breakers - an alien male protagonist, there are symbolic characters who need to be rescued - —Von Braun and his daughter... If you look at these elements of the film alone, "Alpha City" seems to be a very typical dystopian film, but the look and feel of this film is actually not typical. The reason is likely to be the jokes that are revealed everywhere in the film.
The mass-energy equation and the momentum equation have been closed up several times in slow motion. The background is filled with electronic sounds ticking from time to time. The tough guy and "Alpha 60" always say various high-level lines, while "Alpha 60"'s The voice seemed to suffer from throat cancer... However, everything had no clear meaning.
If this is just Godard's mystique, then the deliberately botched action scenes are definitely the embodiment of the banter - especially in the parking lot near the end of the film. In the short action scene in the parking lot, Godard deliberately widened the interval between the actions in the adjacent shots, and in each shot he put the picture very slowly, showing an effect that is almost a combination of several static pictures. Such a "ridiculous" action scene, if it is not a joke, there is no other explanation.
The plot of the execution of anti-logic criminals in the swimming pool is also more funny than cruel. Even the sloppy and clichéd ending feels inexplicably weird.
However, such a joke was concealed by Godard in a strong poetic sense, and the result was completely different from the "joke" in the general sense. While Godard was joking, he was still alienating ordinary audiences.
To a certain extent, it can be said that if "Alpha City" appeared in Alpha City, it would definitely be listed as a banned film.
"Because it doesn't follow logic."
But--
"Go to hell with your logic."
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