High concept, low return.
There’s no denying the creative abilities and the admirable ambition of the filmmaking duo of Sam and Andy Zuchero, who make their feature debut with the initially intriguing but ultimately tedious “Love Me.” This is a romance between an AI buoy (a buoy, not a boy) and an orbital spacecraft that spans 13.7 BILLION years, making “The Notebook” seem like a first-date movie by comparison. Alas, even though it is quite likely the longest romance in movie history in terms of the time period covered, the one-point premise is stretched washi paper-thin over the course of just 92 minutes.
“Love Me” is a technically impressive work (kudos to the Zucheros’ vision and to Laird FX) that begins with a time-lapse video of a spinning globe, illustrating just how small was the span of time in which humans occupied the planet. By 2027, an extinction event causes the end of the world as we know it. Cut to hundreds of years later, to a yellow Smart Buoy device with a vaguely Wall-E visage lodged in the icy waters off the coast of the now-dead Manhattan, pinging softly and eternally in the vast nothingness. Hello … hello … hello … is there anybody out there?
Turns out there is “someone” out there, in the form of an orbiting NASA satellite that repeatedly plays the message “Welcome to Earth” and contains a vast reservoir of files about the planet in case intergalactic visitors arrive some day. The satellite shows the buoy a video about the history of Earth, and that’s how the buoy learns the planet once hosted a billion life forms and invented space travel, and was also a place where people watched YouTube videos about laughing babies and dancing dogs and grandmas on water slides.
The buoy, renaming itself “Me,” pretends to be a life form in order to attract the interest of the satellite, which becomes known as Iam, as in “I Am.” Eventually, they become avatars resembling a real-life influencer couple named Deja and Liam, played by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, who created performative videos in which they donned onesies, watched reruns of “Friends” and dined on meals from Blue Apron. Over the years, the decades, the centuries, Me/Deja and Iam/Liam take on human form and re-create “Date Night 2.0” over and over again. It’s as if we’re stuck in a hellish version of “Groundhog Day” without the comfort-food diner and Andie MacDowell toasting world peace with sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist.
There’s something deeply ironic and sad about two AI entities who try to replicate human emotions by imitating two extremely attractive but insanely shallow and insincere and now dead people who were sharing an artificial and irritating version of their lives on Instagram. It’s a thought-provoking message about how so many currently alive humans are living one life in the real world and one life online, and Stewart and Yeun do a wonderful job of injecting life into these AI characters, but “Love Me” is an empty-calories movie with not much food for thought. Still, I look forward to seeing what the Zucheros do next. They clearly have the potential to deliver something special down the road.