Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution | Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965)

Alphaville  is the only science fiction film that Jean-Luc Godard made, and yet it's both more and less than a sci-fi movie. It is also something of a noirish detective story filmed in 1960s Paris, although there are hints of German silent cinema with bits of Brian Aldiss's sci-fi novel Non-Stop and Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend; the subtitle refers to Peter Cheyney's Lemmy Caution books, whose film adaptations Eddy Constantine had previously starred in. Here though, Caution calls himself Ivan Johnson who writes for Figaro-Pravda (one of Godard's jokes) when he enters the dystopian world of Alphaville, which is run by a dictatorial computer called Alpha 60, whose purpose is to create a place where emotion doesn't exist, and is constantly changing Alphaville's dictionary, reducing it to exclude any words which express emotion: obvious shades of Orwell's Newspeak.

Caution is a detective who aims to kill Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), the creator of the computer and who used to be Leonard Nosferatu (another of Godard's jokes), and also to destroy the computer itself. In a world where sex is reduced to a natural function with no emotional feelings involved, and where any members of Alphaville who register emotions are interrogated and killed if found to be 'illogical', Caution meets Braun's daughter Natacha (Anna Karina) and falls in love with her, although she doesn't understand the meaning of the word.

As in all conventional films (although this is of course far removed from conventional), Caution achieves his aims and retreats from the wrecked Alphaville with Natacha, whose last hesitant words are 'Je vous aime'. Yes, it's a love story too.