Directed By Andrew and Sam Zuchero

Starring – Kristen Stewart, Steven Yuen

The Plot – A postapocalyptic romance in which a surveilling buoy named Me (Stewart) and a satellite I Am (Yuen) meet online and fall in love after the end of human civilization.

Rated R for some sexuality/nudity.

Love Me | Official Trailer | Bleecker Street

POSITIVES

From a visual spectrum, “Love Me” radiates breathlessly with its combination of alluring imagery and stirring production values that gives the audience plenty of artistic flare to chew on, for a duo of directors who will undoubtedly be considered visionaries one day. As to where their flawed writing leaves more to be desired, the Zuchero’s make this an entrancing engagement involving Earth scope and universal spectrum that really makes this love story between these two androids feel epic, especially with the magnetism of its piano driven score and unorthodox editing, which cloak the entire presentation in an air of self-awareness articulating how small we as people truly are in the grander scheme of things. In particular on the editing, the film deviates between stitched together Youtube videos feeding into each of the script’s zeroed-in talking points, and documentary style photography of Earth shots, constructing such a beautiful reminder to the beauty and blessing that living life is, over the things that we as a materialistic society often take for granted, and it’s clear that these duo of directors made the most of a rumored 7 million dollar budget by luminating us with an imposition factor in the scope and scale of this story’s established setting, which most independent films can’t even attempt to tap into. On top of the gorgeously stimulating presentation, the performances from this two person ensemble are quite effective at translating the monotony of two artificial properties attempting to grasp human emotions in their profoundly confusing sentiments, particularly Kristen Stewart, whom we spend a majority of the engagement alongside. She brings along her on-command watery eyes that are used sparingly to convey the overwhelming nature of an imperfect system within her trying to grapple with the things that we as humans find important, and when Me’s overcome by such an isolation factor of loneliness to float on a deserted planet, only then does the movie finally feel like it’s able to articulate some of the heft in emotion that it pulls upon so forcefully. Steven Yuen also continues his consistency for x-factor characters that drive a lot of the internal conflict of the narrative, with I Am serving as the audience’s greatest tool to diagnose evidential hypocrisies, especially as the script treads closer to materialism. Yuen prospers with such a glaringly palpable essence of confusion and even uncomfortable conformity in ways that conjure apathy for the character, and though he and Stewart’s characters are often at an impasse of conflict between them, their chemistry during the last twenty minutes of the film kept it salvageable.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, “Love Me” is arguably the most pretentious film that I have seen since 2014’s “Collateral Beauty”, albeit for a lot of the same shallowness and lack of entertaining quality that made that one of my least favorite films for that year. This is a screenplay that dares to ask and challenge questions and definitions of existentialism and self-acceptance between characters who are quite literally named “Me” and “I Am”, without anything to add to the conversation, with these episodic insights into the film’s talking points that don’t even come close to reaching the kind of ample run time (86 minutes) needed to push provocative audience insights, while also entertaining them with a narrative and characters that we can wholeheartedly grasp onto, to which I never came close in feeling compelled or driven for Me to find herself in a world that has already been destroyed. At least there’s some kind of excuse for the horrendously repetitious dialogue that persists between these artificial characters, but it doesn’t make such on-the-nose and heavy-handed lines any easier to overlook, especially during scenes meant to emulate the live spontaneity of a Youtube channel, which are often paused so a character can look directly at the camera and profess the kind of questions that the Zuchero’s think their audience are too stupid to ask on their own. On top of this, the film seedily feels like another example of Hollywood trying to normalize artificial intelligence on a grander scale, without even remotely pointing out the ironies of an intelligence system overtaking someone’s identity for our own enjoyment. This immediately compromised any hopes that I had of attaching onto these characters, but beyond that made it uncomfortable during first act scenes where everything from the vocal capacities to the backstories of these real-life people were lifted without second thought, and it just makes me wish that cinema would go back to the times when, all or nothing, artificial intelligence was an evil tool sought out for world domination. The pacing for the film is also a sloppily rushed mess that feels like it transitions on to the next talking point without inscribing closure to the one at the forefront of the scene it’s in, making this hour-and-a-half progress with the urgency and momentum of a root canal. Part of me thinks that the film would be a lot better without the disjointed introduction that unfortunately sets a precedent that continues unchallenged throughout, but the exploration as a whole can’t find a way to appraise even the slightest inkling of suspense for Me’s internal conflict, and as a predictably evident result, this love story squanders Stewart and Yuen’s legitimate chemistry, leaving this as coldly and uncalculating as any romance film that I’ve maybe ever seen. Even at the heights of the film’s climax, with the couple’s reunion from a typical third act breakup teetering on the edge of extinction, the resolution feels too neatly convenient and meandering to leave any shred of speculation to the audience, even with the film’s groanworthy message that love between anyone or anything prospers in the face of annihilation. Finally, the one section where the film’s limited budget does set in is during animated sequences meant to trigger the simulated realities of Me’s created world, where she gets to taste some semblance of humanity that has otherwise alluded her manufactured essence, and while the uninspired animated renderings are definitely intentional, in order to craft such an underdeveloped and lifeless setting, I do wish the Zuchero’s did something slightly more ambitious here that catered more prominently towards the jaw-dropping beauty that they artistically elicited with Germain McMicking’s entrancingly orbiting space bound cinematography, especially since this film already takes its abundance of chances that sometimes do actually work. The sequences are nothing special, particularly in a lack of emanating color and realistic character designs that are a bit of a chore to coherently interpret, but beyond that feel slightly unnecessary when the following scenes quite literally bring Stewart and Yuen’s real life captures to the forefront of the engagement, leaving me wishing that they took this approach in the first place, instead of some of the most choppy looking and underwhelming animation that I have seen since “Norm of the North”.

OVERALL
“Love Me” is a space bound love story at the end of an apocalyptic world that is all style and no substance within its theological observations that are about as deep as a stoner’s Youtube page. Despite life-injecting performances from Kristen Stewart and Steven Yuen in its favor, the film’s pretentiousness for shallow dialogue and superficially unexplored observations make it feel like a 30-minute short film that has been stretched to feature length limits, without adding or appraising anything of eye-opening revelation to the audience, who quickly find their attention spans taking orbit after such an artificial level of intelligence calling itself profound.

My Grade: 4.3 or D-