At its most basic level, the film, often humorously misrepresented as a Sundance original, ’Love Me’ is about the father and child relationship between a buoy lost at sea and an ever orbiting satellite above the earth. Set in a not so distant future when no human walks the earth and the only objects of sentiment surviving the extinction AI machines have access only to thousands of GigaBytes worth of data salvaged from various search engines and social networks, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s offbeat cosmic love story is irreverent. It is for the two devices that the audience can cheer if they wish, or they can sink as deep as they wish into this most peculiar of romances and place themselves over AI characters played in various ways by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun.
Those two are indeed stunning and complex and one can only imagine the cinematic chemistry they would have if they were not merely portraying glorified intergalactic cyberspace robot dolls. This creation of the Zucheros is both fresh and bolder in its concept, but as it also suffers from some of the same ADHD issues that afflicted ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (both are movies made for multimedia consumers with pre-conditioned brains to swap into different screens every couple of seconds). Not even close to the sophistication found in ‘Casablanca’ or, for that matter, Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ with its almost stripped bare visual design.
You know how all the cliches in sci-fi involve robots wishing they were human? Well, in this particular scenario, the expectation allows the human audience members to project whatever emotions they may have on Stewart and Yeun’s characters, as the 2 machines who are Self-Monitoring Analyzing and Revision Technology sort of the genesis version of a couple who are together for almost one billion years – fantasize what it means to be a couple or to be alive or in love. Where time compresses itself, the film begins showing us the destruction that left the SB350 Smart Buoy stuck a few miles from the edge of what was once Manhattan.
It’s the future that Steven Spielberg has drawn in the last act of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, and it’s the future that Zucheros manage to portray much more effectively by shooting practically, enabling us to engage with the floating device from the first time we ‘see’ it. The same can be said about the helper satellite, which was supposed to resemble a long-tail blue comet which plummets into the sky. In close-up it was Laird FX that constructed it to scale (a bit of wisdom, as half of the mid section of the film is filled with visual effects).
One seems to possess a lens while the other portrays some panels, thus neither appears to be anthropomorphic per se. However, one cannot skirt around the fact that Wall-E and Eve had eyes, limbs, and Pixar animators portraying their expressions in an anthropomorphic manner.” Love Me” has the focus on some comedy where they settle for low-concept punches at the 2024 type of online culture. But the Zucheros do not cuteness and allow adult (or at least young adult) imaginations to do the heavy lifting.
The buoy self-styled ‘me.life.form’ or short ‘Me’ and the satellite ‘Iam’ begin as empty canvas AIs. My task is finding a connection while I have to seek a connection with any life living on the earth once occupied by human beings. And they do, except for a small starting point. Me does not view myself as a living entity but must act in this capacity to establish the connection. It is within the realm of reality that the lying begins. Me has the facetious analog to the female version of the mythos about lonely women on dating sites who display their best version as some level of attraction. Embellishments of some sorts that make the person appear more attractive, appealing or average than they are over the average person.
Once the Me and I am link has been accomplished, the Zuchero’s give a digital environment with which the remaining of their interactions can take place. First, a blank screen hunting software, then a low-grade VR unit designed as an apartment belonging to an influencer couple known as Deja and Liam (who Me follows on Instagram and features Stewart and Yeun). Looking like Deja, Me claims to be Deja and in this way formulates a more developed version of the rom-com’s a plot device, the lie-based trope in which one character lies believing that the other will leave when the truth is revealed. In the beginning, Me is a YouTube addict and watch unlimited clips where the word “love” is in used which is represented in various styles from puppies to parent-child relationships. There is no doubt, to the AIs that outlive us, this must be a painful experience, how distressing the feelings of the humans in particular relationships can be. The Zucheros, however, delve deeper by looking at the buoy and satellite as metaphors of the human brain, this concerns the manners in which people regard themselves, and how different social artifacts work as constructs of: Marriage, maternal roles, etc.
He thinks very fondly of a posting made by Deja with striking visuals in her video titled “Date Night 2.0” showing the couple making quesadillas, sharing kisses, and watching “Friends.” In the history of that sitcom, plus most of the Hollywood business for the past hundred years, can sound as artificial and unrepeatable, as other, Deja’s posts for an audience. Depending on the level on which one chooses to take “Love Me”, Me and Iam might be truer to life than one understands, only the puppets of the society depicting what an ideal partner should be like. (Less clear of comprehension is the absurdly long distance they are said to be separated for. I am said to run around in my quest to create water and slowly build the virtual flat.)
In the case of him and I am, the screen time spent engaging with the sex scene, when it finally arrives, should be regarded as the best two minutes in a work which presents itself as confusing (But never boring) for the Zucheros, 91 minutes in length feature of theirs Almost all the measures usually employed by editors Joseph Krings and Salman Handy about shots defied the grammar in a movie about love and identity and the ideas were well outside the box. In that particular cut and montage, Me and Iam have steadily progressed from low-level Sims avatars to more realistic, more physically notable Stewart and Yeun who wore long hair and had breasts in Me’s imagination.
What is her ultimate wish? To what extent have these emotions been nurtured by society rather than self-generated? These indeed are interesting questions, the focus on real self in the age of AI, but I would prefer to see them performed by actors in the real world (while the essential all-primitive avatars get insufferably annoying in the film’s too-long middle section). In their very conceptually vague way, the Zucheros appear to have taken the scenic route of going around all the sun only to end up back where they started in a boy meets girl tale.
As the two robots repeat “Date Night 2.0” an infinite number of times until they finally get it, one cannot help but see some error in the premise: What is so special about this experience that it becomes the only model of romantic love? And even if the robots have an idea about romance, why would they care about it anyway? Given two SMART devices with intelligent brains and a billion years, one would presume they evolve past such primitive models of relationships. Heck, maybe they could even show us a few things instead of ending just where humans did before destroying themselves.
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