Alphaville is an attack on the syndrome of Science Fiction films full of flash and color but devoid of ideas. They intentionally took an "Our Town" attitude toward special effects -- e.g. driving along in a car, with dialog indicating that they're in a spaceship; commenting on how beautiful the stars look when you can't see anything but the glare of streetlights, and so on. If there's a problem with this movie, it's that the ideas themselves are perhaps not really all that strong; the notion of a dystopian city ruled by an all powerful computer just doesn't seem that heavy, not even taken as some sort of symbolic allegory; but on the whole I think SF cinema would be in much better shape if it had learned the lesson of Alphaville (think "La Jette"). Minimalism is not a crime, which is why I find it very annoying that I need to babble for another couple of lines to convince IMDb.com that I've said enough to be worth logging as a movie review.