Alphaville

Some say this is a superb film, somewhat similar to 'Blade Runner', some say it is not. Whatever your opinion Alphaville has its place and tells a somewhat near future story. The film entails a mysterious "Outland" agent, Lemmy Caution who arrives in Alphaville, a metropolis controlled by Professor Von Braun and a massive computer system called Alpha-60. Dominated by Alpha-60's perfect logic, the citizens of Alphaville have lost their ability to think, to communicate, and to love. Lemmy Caution struggles to destroy the machine and rescue Von Braun's daughter Natascha.


Alphaville brings across themes of a controlling technology. It makes you wonder if this could happen in the future. Many of us would say, "As if this could happen," but think about it, everything these days are going online and are put into computer databases. Our bank details, birth certificates, passports, centrelink, university grades etc are all backed up by computers. Could this personal information ever be tampered with? Of course. What's stopping anyone!

Even now, programmers and IT experts are designing computers to monitor and learn from human behaviour. Playing games against the computer is just one example of this. You could say that sooner or later computers will be able to determine our next move even before we play it out. They will know our behaviours to minute detail, subsequently leading to a sense of hopelessness in most of us. Just like Alphaville we too can be "taken over" if we are not careful.

Why do you think we have hard copies or paper copies? Is it for our safety? Or is it just that we do not trust technology? What would happen if everything was digital? I could not fathom the thought of everything on digital technology even though this could happen in the future. Some people say the future is scary, but I think that not having control over your own future is scarier.