Oh, buoy! The oddball ‘Love Me’ fails to compute
Give the bizarre tech-mance “Love Me” an A for effort and a solid D for execution. It’s the futuristic brainchild of husband-wife collaborators Sam and Andy Zuchero, combining elements of sci-fi, romance and existentialism into a mishmashed concoction of half-baked ideas on how a now-extinct human race viewed love and sex just before the apocalypse.
The title is certainly intriguing. Is “Love Me” meant to be interpreted as a statement, a question, or a plea? After seeing it, I’m still not sure. Nor am I particularly inspired to give it much thought, especially when the premise revolves around a “super” buoy and a communications satellite making whoopee in cyberspace. It’s sort of like Kubrick’s HAL hooking up with Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice from “Her” and producing a bouncing baby bore.
The film is told in three distinctive acts. It opens with the buoy waking up in the middle of a rapidly thawing ocean, no doubt frozen over during a second Ice Age. We’re told it’s a billion years after humans ceased to exist, presumably through their own idiocy. You marvel, not over the buoy itself, but the fact that its batteries still function after hibernating in its glacial tomb for one thousand millennia. Ditto for the manmade satellite orbiting above. But I digress.
What’s important to the Zucheros is that we watch two inanimate objects evolve into human beings while observing well-preserved YouTube and TikTok posts uploaded billions of years ago. In this scenario, the buoy is a girl going by the moniker of Me and the male satellite self-identifies as Iam, as in I am amazed by how dumb and preposterous this initially plays. It doesn’t get much better in Act II when the buoy and satellite morph into avatars of Kristen Stewart and “Beef’s” Steven Yeun. Despite their herculean endeavors, the story remains clunky and impenetrable. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Act III when the two stars go full human, falling madly in love while discovering the joy of ice cream, sex and – oh, my God – orgasms!
Yeun, and especially Stewart, do what they can with the thin material but fail to convince us that the movie they’re trapped in is anything more than a gimmick, a clever one, but a gimmick nonetheless. What makes it particularly exasperating is all the cheesy existential dialogue, like “We are becoming who we are,” and “I’ve always been Me.” And my favorite, delivered by Iam, “You need not tell me how to tell you what I have to tell you.” Yes, it makes your head explode.
What does it all mean? You’ve got me. I suspect it has something to do with AI learning to mimic our behavior by examining the self-absorbed crap we post on social media, and how it will be perceived by the humanoids one billion years from now. The Zucheros seem to believe the response will be highly positive. Yeesh, that’s depressing, especially if such projections prove prophetic. To paraphrase Descartes, “I post, therefore I am.” Or, should that be Iam? Who cares? We’re probably all as doomed as “Love Me’s” box-office prospects.
Movie review
Love Me
Rated: R for some sexuality and nudity
Cast: Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun
Directors: Sam and Andy Zuchero
Writers: Sam and Andy Zuchero
Runtime: 92 minutes
Where: In theaters Jan. 31 (limited)
Grade: D
