Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution is a 99-minute 1965 science fiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on the novel by Paul Éluard and starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff.
Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers
The plot is simple - Lemmy Caution, an 'outland' agent, arrives in the futuristic city of Alphaville to search for missing agent Henry Dickson. The city is under the control of Professor von Braun and run by the Alpha 60 computer system. Love, poetry, emotion and so on are outlawed for the inhabitants of the city creating an inhuman and alienated society. Caution enlists Natascha, the daughter of von Braun, to help him.
Godard uses the plot to produce a bizarre, messy film shot through with elliptic philosophical dialogue and cynical humour. The film is deliberately dark, in terms of physical lighting as well as many other factors. The action is unbalanced and surprising, Caution is a parody of an American private eye, wearing the trench-coat and shooting people carelessly he is defiantly erratic in the logical city. The key is the battle between Caution and Alpha 60, Caution's love for Natascha introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city that the computer has crafted in its own image. The film was shot in 1960s Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming Alphaville with modernist glass and concrete being used for interiors, reflecting the problems of the future onto contemporary France. There are no special effects to enhance the science fiction elements of the film. In a rather clumsy move Godard apparently wanted to title the film Tarzan versus IBM.
The film also features its version of George Orwell's newspeak.