It’s rare for a movie about a romance to tell more than a fraction of the love story. Often it’s just the early parts, when a couple tries to get together and then ultimately succeeds. But “Love Me” takes the opposite approach: Its events stretch over about six billion years. Oh, and its only two characters are a buoy and a satellite.
For their feature directorial debut, Sam and Andy Zuchero (who are married in real life, and have been making art together since they were teenagers) did not opt for the easy route. In “Love Me,” the “smart” buoy and the satellite (voiced by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun), created to be capable of detecting and interacting with humanity, are apparently the only remnants of civilization left on Earth after some cataclysm plunged the planet into an ice age. There are shades of Pixar’s “Wall-E” here, but while the robots in that movie eventually catch up with humans out in the cosmos, the buoy and the satellite are really, truly alone. Once they’ve made contact with one another, they rely on the residue of the now-abandoned internet to construct a fantasy world of their own.
A tale like this one requires a lot of inventive filmmaking. What does a buoy sound like when it’s acquiring speech, and how do you make it intelligible to the audience? What does a mechanical eye do when it sees something? How do you visually represent the developing relationship between two pieces of technological equipment separated by thousands of miles (the satellite is in orbit, the buoy in the sea)? What would billions of years of meteorological and topographical changes on the planet actually look like?
The Zucheros bring a great deal of imagination to the task, and the sheer audacity of the movie is enough to make it worth watching, even if, at times, the gadgets’ sentimental education starts to feel repetitive. The internet, awash with the documentation of people’s lives through video and images, provides a lot of fodder to these smart technologies, which are lonely and eager to connect with one another in ways that are not in their programming. In this case, the buoy — who begins calling herself “Me,” and dubs the satellite “Iam” — finds the account of a long-gone influencer named Deja (also played by Stewart), a peppy blonde vlogger, and becomes obsessed with recreating Deja’s Instagram-documented relationship with her boyfriend, Liam (also played by Yeun).
It should be evident by now that you never really know where “Love Me” will head next, which is a lot of its charm. It’s also a bit of its problem: The movie spins its wheels midway for a while, in part because it’s hard to develop the emotional landscape of a buoy and a satellite, and that’s what would give the romance more stakes for the audience. It also means the characters (who, by this point, are interacting in animated, avatar-like forms) are not all that interesting. What’s most fun about the movie is its world-building, which by nature can’t be the whole movie.
Yet, like most sci-fi inflected romances — including the wonderful new Broadway play “Maybe Happy Ending,” about two abandoned robots who find each other — this is not really a movie about machines in love. It’s about what it means to be human, to love and hurt and worry and grow.
It’s also touching a more contemporary question, one increasingly posed by movies about robots and artificial intelligence. Are the beings we may create — the beings we are creating, right now, in fact — capable of love? In the past, movies like Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and Spike Jonze’s “Her” told stories of A.I. learning to love people as a proxy for exploring the nature of human love. But now, it feels far less fictional to imagine A.I.-powered toys and helpers and companions joining our everyday lives.
If they can learn to truly love one another, and us, that raises a whole set of questions: What responsibility do we owe to them? What if we decide to upgrade and replace them? Then other worries arise: If they simulate love, who benefits? If they don’t care, what’s to keep them from destroying us?
These questions dance around the edges of “Love Me.” The movie doesn’t try to resolve them. There’s something in here about the dangers of confusing the internet for real life, but the stronger message is in the film’s major theme: We can’t love someone else until we love who we really are, and thus pretending to be what we’re not will inevitably destroy us. That’s a simple idea in the end, but it’s wrapped in a wonderfully ambitious film.
The post ‘Love Me’ Review: A Romance Six Billion Years in the Making appeared first on New York Times.
