A high-concept vehicle about machines falling in love, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me aims to be a fable about how the detritus left behind by now-extinct humanity could serve as a misleading guide to how romance should be done. The film starts with an impressive animated opening montage showing the history of Earth in a comedically sped-up fashion; what might be a species-annihilating nuclear war is viewed from a distance as just a flicker of sparks across the planet’s surface. It’s a very grandiose presentation of what’s ultimately a thin sliver of an idea about how social media tropes impede rather than help relationships.
Following that ambitious start, the Zucheros downshift awkwardly into something that feels more like a Pixar film by way of Stanley Kubrick. Love Me zooms in to the Earth’s frozen and lifeless surface in the near post-apocalyptic future. Except for some battered skyscrapers in the distance, all that seems to remain of the human species is a scientific research buoy stuck in the ice. The tone is voluptuously sad, with heartfelt piano on the soundtrack, a moonlit sky, and an adorable robot with one big blinking eye sending its plaintive message into the void: “Smart Buoy waiting to connect.” Then the buoy spots another adorable robot, a satellite zipping overhead beaming out a “Welcome to Earth” message, and spots an opportunity.
Much of Love Me follows the digital courtship of these two remnants of a long-gone civilization. The buoy pretends to be a lifeform to get the satellite (self-described as “humanity’s tombstone,” it carries petabytes of data to share with any aliens who may come past) interested. Their love story takes place largely over the satellite dumping out YouTube montages. The buoy seizes on a series of videos shot by an influencer, Deja (Kristen Stewart), about her supposedly perfect life with her husband, Liam (Stephen Yeun), and decides this is the character it wants to inhabit.
The Zucheros present the get-to-know-you parts of the story as a bleak comedy in which the buoy and satellite are shown as avatars of Deja and Liam. It’s a distancing technique that too-obviously reinforces the artificiality of these machines (who may be sentient, though it’s not quite clear) play-acting the already artificial construct of an influencer romance.
Watching “Deja” treating the perfect recreation of a Blue Apron-sponsored dinner with “Liam” with the intensity of a Shakespearean actor could have been funny, even enlightening, but the repetition is deadening. Satire could have been mined from robots seeking something beyond their programming (“What does it feel like to be alive?” Liam asks in confusion) by cosplaying humans at their fakest. But given that the world has ended, the point seems somewhat cruel.
The further Love Me develops its scenario, the less plausible it becomes, even by lovelorn sci-fi standards. The halting development of Deja and Liam’s relationship is uninteresting enough that it provokes a litany of questions. Why, if there are only two machines left on the entire planet, is one a research buoy? What’s this metaverse space that their avatars inhabit? What explains the shift to live action? After a while, you may also ask why the film isn’t over yet.
In theory, much of what plays out on screen should be heartbreaking, but instead it’s flat and redundant. There’s a strain of true romanticism in Love Me’s critique of how social media performance can heighten the challenges for people—or robots, in this case—already struggling to determine what’s authentic and what’s artifice. But that perspective gets lost in the uninspired techno-twaddle, which keeps the Zucheros’ film from delivering some of the same human truths that its robot characters are struggling to stumble upon.
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