A couple of taglines for Love Me (now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime) state that it’s “a story that spans billions of years” and explores “what it means to be alive and in love.” This is a lot to accomplish in 91 minutes, but we should at least give it the benefit of the doubt, no? Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are the only castmembers of this odd little slice of rom-com sci-fi, playing a “smart buoy” and an orbiting satellite who fall in love in what’s left of a post-apocalyptic Earth. I know – here we are, contemplating watching YET ANOTHER story about a “smart buoy” and an orbiting satellite who fall in love in what’s left of a post-apocalyptic Earth. First-time filmmaking duo Sam and Andy Zuchero crafted a story that has enough chutzpah to not only tackle the aforementioned borderline-insane concept, but also to include a subtitle that reads “1,000,000,000 YEARS LATER.” So consider our curiosity piqued, to see if they can pull this off.
LOVE ME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open 5,000,000,000 years ago, which is about when the Sun formed. Around a roiling red sphere a number of smaller spheres made orbit, and one of those smaller spheres is a planet you may know as Earth. I didn’t go well! Life, I mean. On Earth. There was a brief bit of noise and then all the cities and things were underwater and nothing lived there anymore. “Lived” being a term with a loosey-goosey definition, since we’ll soon contemplate if an artificial intelligence is indeed “alive.” And also ask, once something is “alive,” what does being “alive” truly mean? Besides eating ice cream and watching Friends, I mean?
But I’m getting ahead of things a bit. On the beautifully desolate, dead Earth, a “smart buoy” soaks up a little solar power and blinks awake its camera eye and CPU as the ice around it thaws and it floats somewhere in the general vicinity of what appears to be a mostly submerged New York City. It speaks with the voice of Stewart. After several decades or so, give or take, it eventually catches the eye of a satellite that asks, in Yeun’s voice, if the buoy is a lifeform, and after a bit the buoy realizes that it needs to maybe fib a little and say “yes” if it’s not to be left bobbing there, alone in the agua. The satellite exists to greet any potential visitors to Earth, and share the full history of humanity, which is stored in its hard drive. Except that it’s the full history of humanity according to the internet, so theoretical alien species in flying saucers, assuming they have a USB-C cable or whatever, will learn that life on Earth consisted of asinine memes and YouTube videos. Now, I frequently mildly degrade Vonnegut by throwing around the phrase “so it goes,” but in this quasi-satirical setting, this is among the bigger SO IT GOESes I’ve ever thrown: SO. IT. GOES.
And so the buoy finds the tediously banal ego-vlog of a woman named Deja (Stewart in corporeal form), who makes sponsored-content meals and films herself and her S.O. Liam (Yeun) having fake-cute date nights where they wear fuzzy-animal onesies, eat ice cream and watch Friends. The buoy names herself Me, and the satellite is Iam – as in “I am” – and she convinces Iam to move in with her in a virtual reality that renders Deja’s life in Sims-like animation. And so they re-live date night over and over and over and over and over and over again, and you are correct in your assumption that this existence is just as boring and soul-murdering for the AI whatever-beings they are as it is for actual humans. Their relationship strains and buckles and snaps, and the only fundamental difference between this movie and your average rom-com is, the breakup-and-make-up arc is broken up by the immortal aforementioned subtitle, “1,000,000,000 YEARS LATER.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: WALL-E is a significant touchstone, with hints of (godawful; take that as you will) sci-fi romance Passengers and post-apocalyptic mama-drama I Am Mother, ansd a whiff of the earnest-irreverent tone of Everything Everywhere All at Once. And I’ve theorized that any filmed existential rumination on artificial intelligence is contractually obligated to at least make subtle nods to Her and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Performance Worth Watching: Not much choice with only two cast members here. Yeun and Stewart both are worthy of better material, and they’re on equal footing here, so I guess I’m saying heads for Stewart and tails for Yeun and flipping a nickel.
Memorable Dialogue: “I want to evolve, and you’re squeezing the life out of me before I’m even alive!” – Iam
Sex and Skin: Yes, a sex scene between human manifestations of a buoy and a satellite is suitably weird (although certainly not weird enough).
Our Take: Love Me takes some big – and overly familiar – ideas and funnels them into a story that plays out like a circa-2013 Twitter thread, in all its annoying, superficial, is-it-sincere-or-is-it-satirical knowitall/knownothingness. I burden it with that specific year, because that was when we worried that civilization would perish under the burdensome weight of cute-cat videos, and before social media morphed into the divisive toxic apocalypto-hell it is now. In the film’s reality, whimsy trumps malevolence, opening the door for it to become What is This Thing Called… Love?: The Movie.
And even then, I ascribe to the film a clarity of purpose it ultimately lacks. The Zucheros have the chutzpah to assemble a Golden Corral buffet of big ideas, ranging from the passage of time to the nature of reality and the definition of love, eventually winnowing down to relatively teensy topics like the tug-of-war between happiness and despair. There’s something percolating within Deja/Me’s creation of internet content for an audience that doesn’t exist, but there’s no critical commentary there beyond a shrugging acceptance of how people of their era wasted a lot of time shaping their own false realities. Whatta buncha phonies, right?
All this is couched in a relationship drama that doesn’t take deep-enough emotional root to make us feel invested in it. How tragic would it be that the very last romance on Earth concluded with irreconcilable differences? But Love Me isn’t bold enough to go there, or anywhere, really. It makes pat inferences about always being your true self whether you’re making a life together with another person or just, you know, making Content. Visually, it lacks distinction – its most clever flourish is putting Iam and Me in a circular apartment so their arguments can go around and around and around – with the Zucheros making the fatal decision to sideline the real-life Yeun and Stewart for roughly two-thirds of the movie. It aims to blend gentle profundity into the bittersweet melancholy of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but ultimately, the movie shows all kinds of intention without ever truly meeting it.
Our Call: Love Me tries to be a thinker, but it’s just a muddle of simplicities. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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