10 Great Sci-Fi Movies With Terrible Concepts

“What if you fell in love with Siri?” is not, it’s fair to say, the most promising premise.

And yet 2013's Her, like The Truman Show before it, managed to not only overcome the potentially silly sounding nature of its central conceit, but actually wring some pretty moving satire out of the idea.

It's down to a pair of superb performances that this one succeeds.

First, an unrecognisable Joaquin Phoenix as the nebbish protagonist managed to convince the viewer that many modern lovelorn people are removed enough from human contact to consider their operating systems a replacement for human, let alone, romantic, relationships.

Then Scarlett Johansson's sultry and animated voice-only role as said operating system infuses what could have been a creepy, robotic monotone with real heart. It's still a strange premise, and one which not every viewer fell for.

But Her undeniably succeeds for the vast majority of moviegoers by focusing on the growing rapport between its central characters rather than dwelling on the more-than-a-little unconventional nature of their romance. By refuse to treat its own premise as outlandish, the film grounds its far-fetched story in what feels like a recognisable reality and avoids genre cliches as a result.

There's no fear of A.I. here, nor any hoary "get off your cell phone" anti-tech moral. Instead, the film tells a touching love story by focusing on character over conceit.