There are some affinities between this movie and the novel and film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which pitted an outwardly emotionless agent of the oppressive Powers that Be against a raging, scruffy, grandiloquent pig hero whose unpredictability and danger symbolized the free will that was in danger of being lost.
— Matt Zoller Seitz (RogerEbert.com)
Alphaville is so clearly the ultimate Message Movie that one may fail to see that it is, equally, the ultimate Meaningless Movie. Godard creates his future society with its rigid logic out of a series of images joined with carefree illogic, sketches his computer with the technique of a Pollock.[…]
With this kind of material it's not a matter of being Against Interpretation, but of recognizing that interpretation is superfluous. The film is basically psychological rather than political; it attacks not the superstate but the modern habit of judging experience through the intellect and at the expense of feeling.
— John Thomas (Film Quarterly)
Synopsis: Lemmy Caution is on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of a malevolent computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s daughter Natasha, Lemmy must unravel the mysteries of the strictly logical Alpha 60 and teach Natasha the meaning of the word “love.”