Should You Watch It or Give It a Miss?

The taglines for Love Me (now available on Paramount+ with Showtime) suggest it’s “a story that spans billions of years” and delves into “what it means to be alive and in love.” That’s quite a task to tackle in just 91 minutes, but perhaps we should be open to the possibility, right? Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are the unique duo in this quirky rom-com sci-fi drama, portraying a “smart buoy” and an orbiting satellite that fall in love amidst the remains of a post-apocalyptic Earth. Yes, we find ourselves here, considering yet another tale about a “smart buoy” and a satellite falling for each other on a ravaged Earth. Filmmakers Sam and Andy Zuchero, in their debut, have bravely taken on this wild concept and included a subtitle reading “1,000,000,000 YEARS LATER.” This certainly stirs our interest as we anticipate whether they can bring this story to life.

LOVE ME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film begins 5,000,000,000 years in the past, about the time when the Sun came into being. Surrounding this fiery sphere are smaller orbs, one of which is Earth. Unfortunately, life didn’t fare well on Earth. There was some brief activity, but soon everything was underwater, leaving the planet lifeless. The definition of “lived” becomes flexible, as the story prompts us to question if artificial intelligence can be considered “alive.” And further, once something gains the status of “alive,” what does it genuinely imply, beyond enjoying ice cream and binge-watching Friends?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. On this strikingly barren and extinct Earth, a “smart buoy” gradually absorbs solar energy, activating its camera and CPU as the surrounding ice melts away, floating somewhere near a partially submerged New York City. Kristen Stewart voices this buoy. After many years pass, the buoy catches the attention of a satellite voiced by Yeun, which inquires if the buoy is a lifeform. The buoy decides to fib a little, claiming “yes” to avoid being left alone in the water. The satellite’s mission is to welcome any possible visitors to Earth and share humanity’s entire history, archived in its memory banks. However, this history comprises mainly the internet’s whims, so hypothetical alien visitors would, presumably with the right connection, learn that life on Earth boiled down to silly memes and YouTube clips. While I sometimes downplay Vonnegut’s influence by citing “so it goes,” within this satirical context, it truly feels like an epic rendition of SO. IT. GOES.

And so the buoy finds the tediously banal ego-vlog of a woman named Deja (Stewart in corporeal form), who makes sponsored-content meals and films herself and her S.O. Liam (Yeun) having fake-cute date nights where they wear fuzzy-animal onesies, eat ice cream and watch Friends. The buoy names herself Me, and the satellite is Iam – as in “I am” – and she convinces Iam to move in with her in a virtual reality that renders Deja’s life in Sims-like animation. And so they re-live date night over and over and over and over and over and over again, and you are correct in your assumption that this existence is just as boring and soul-murdering for the AI whatever-beings they are as it is for actual humans. Their relationship strains and buckles and snaps, and the only fundamental difference between this movie and your average rom-com is, the breakup-and-make-up arc is broken up by the immortal aforementioned subtitle, “1,000,000,000 YEARS LATER.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: WALL-E is a significant touchstone, with hints of (godawful; take that as you will) sci-fi romance Passengers and post-apocalyptic mama-drama I Am Mother, ansd a whiff of the earnest-irreverent tone of Everything Everywhere All at Once. And I’ve theorized that any filmed existential rumination on artificial intelligence is contractually obligated to at least make subtle nods to Her and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Performance Worth Watching: Not much choice with only two cast members here. Yeun and Stewart both are worthy of better material, and they’re on equal footing here, so I guess I’m saying heads for Stewart and tails for Yeun and flipping a nickel.

Memorable Dialogue: “I want to evolve, and you’re squeezing the life out of me before I’m even alive!” – Iam

Sex and Skin: Yes, a sex scene between human manifestations of a buoy and a satellite is suitably weird (although certainly not weird enough).

Our Take: Love Me takes some big – and overly familiar – ideas and funnels them into a story that plays out like a circa-2013 Twitter thread, in all its annoying, superficial, is-it-sincere-or-is-it-satirical knowitall/knownothingness. I burden it with that specific year, because that was when we worried that civilization would perish under the burdensome weight of cute-cat videos, and before social media morphed into the divisive toxic apocalypto-hell it is now. In the film’s reality, whimsy trumps malevolence, opening the door for it to become What is This Thing Called… Love?: The Movie. 

And even then, I ascribe to the film a clarity of purpose it ultimately lacks. The Zucheros have the chutzpah to assemble a Golden Corral buffet of big ideas, ranging from the passage of time to the nature of reality and the definition of love, eventually winnowing down to relatively teensy topics like the tug-of-war between happiness and despair. There’s something percolating within Deja/Me’s creation of internet content for an audience that doesn’t exist, but there’s no critical commentary there beyond a shrugging acceptance of how people of their era wasted a lot of time shaping their own false realities. Whatta buncha phonies, right?

All this is couched in a relationship drama that doesn’t take deep-enough emotional root to make us feel invested in it. How tragic would it be that the very last romance on Earth concluded with irreconcilable differences? But Love Me isn’t bold enough to go there, or anywhere, really. It makes pat inferences about always being your true self whether you’re making a life together with another person or just, you know, making Content. Visually, it lacks distinction – its most clever flourish is putting Iam and Me in a circular apartment so their arguments can go around and around and around – with the Zucheros making the fatal decision to sideline the real-life Yeun and Stewart for roughly two-thirds of the movie. It aims to blend gentle profundity into the bittersweet melancholy of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but ultimately, the movie shows all kinds of intention without ever truly meeting it.

Our Call: Love Me tries to be a thinker, but it’s just a muddle of simplicities. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.