Love Me
The kookiest of romances is part "Wall·E," part "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" and part "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun as computer chip-crossed lovers
“Love Me” stars Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, but we don’t actually see them very much in this kookiest of romances.
They spend a good chunk of the movie as robots, providing the voices. Later, as animated projections of those same hardwired brains. Only later do they take on the human forms of the actors themselves. They’re male and female in love, though occasionally Yeun’s character will briefly acquire long hair and boobs. They’re computer chip-crossed lovers, you could say.
It’s a hard movie to describe. Ditto to enjoy.
Written and directed by brother duo Andrew and Sam Zuchero, it’s part “Wall·E,” part “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and part “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” I’d call it highly audacious and experimental, if not entirely successful in what (I think) it’s trying to achieve.
I respected this movie without really liking it very much, if that makes sense.
It’s a post-apocalyptic story set some thousands of years after humans have disappeared from the Earth, doubtless due to some deserved catastrophe. (Bad things never happen to us; we always do it to ourselves.) The planet has become a frozen tundra seemingly devoid of life. Later, a time lapse will take things out much further than that.
At one point, Yeun’s character will complain, “It’s been a billion years.” And he’s not doing hipster irony.
OK, names. Stewart’s is me.life.form. She’s actually a smart buoy set adrift in the ocean to measure temperatures and currents and stuff. She has an electronic eye and with a solar-powered source, can operate more or less indefinitely. She has rudimentary intelligence, enough to perform a now-useless task for humans long gone, like Wall·E.
One day she connects with a star streaking across the sky, which turns out to be a satellite. He was launched in the year 2027 to forever scan “the planet once known as Earth” for life forms. He connects with the buoy, who pretends to be a life form just so she’s not alone. (Hence the name.)
Dubbing himself i.am.satellite, he downloads all of the available knowledge about humans stored in his circuits to the buoy, and from this “me,” as she soon goes by for short, quickly learns all about us. This includes the less useful stuff like videos of babies laughing and professional wrestling.
She quickly latches onto an influencer whose show, “It’s just Deja,” featured herself and her boyfriend, Liam, chilling in their apartment, making meals from one of those kit services, and playing at being very much in love for the cameras.
me is very excited about replicating this experience, and after they gain enough language skills, she and iam (his nickname) project themselves into an animated version of Deja’s apartment. iam is a little uncomfortable with this but goes along, while me grows more and more manipulative in trying to inorganically create a version of life based on the one she saw.
It seems to me the theme of the story is about social media and how disconnected we are, despite so much technology to supposedly bring us to together. We create these virtual avatars of ourselves, and generally try to make them more interesting and wonderful than the real people behind them. iam and me are just doing that literally.
Eventually, the relationship sours — at some point, the truth has to come out that she’s also a robot — and the two are separated. Also, some ecological changes happen on the planet to force the matter. When me finally emerges from her long sleep, she finds that iam has evolved exponentially in his cognitive abilities. He’s more emotionally developed, too, and now it seems like they have another chance to share a loving relationship that’s their own.
“Love Me” is a strange movie. Intellectually it’s got some revolutionary ideas, but emotionally we struggle to connect with me and iam just as much as they do with each other. Their characters essentially grow from infancy through childhood, all while trying to play grown-up romance.
Of course, it’s hard to suspend disbelief that a buoy made to measure water salinity could develop sentience, or for that matter a satellite — even if one designed to make contact with life forms. (And I can guarantee you nobody’s batteries are lasting millennia.)
What we wind up with is a trippy, mildly amusing story about two robots who turn into people. Personally, I’d be more interested in a story that works the other way round.