Love Me is a post-humanity romance involving a satellite orbiting a ravaged Earth and an artificially intelligent buoy in the frozen waters near the remains of New York City, Where first comparison that comes to mind is Pixar’s WALL-E. This sameness extends to the design elements as well, from the buoy’s rusty yellow shell and cute, giant-eyed appearance to the heavenly blue glow of the airborne satellite. However, these are just surface similarities (or maybe even direct influences). The humanity in WALL-E’s robot characters needs no explanation. Love Me on the other hand investigates what it takes for two techno-beings to reach a human understanding of themselves which makes it characterized by its snappy, syrupy but sometimes scary view of our modern digital reality.
If it isn’t happening in screen life sections on a Google-like interface, Love Me is a vicious little VFX-heavy film that clearly knows how to have fun with being present in Uncanny Valley. Its wonky buoy – who calls herself “Me” after reaching some basic level of consciousness – walks between animation and live-action worlds but this will not matter given its rusty one-eyed nature design anyway. So does her boxy satellite friend named “Iam” or “I am.” While circling around Earth, it has absorbed all that’s left of human knowledge and artifacts from the Voyager series such as books, awaiting another form of life that may come across it.”
Once both Iam and I find each other they start searching globally — located seemingly within Iam’s database — through the world wide web for ways to contact each other up till I ask if she can pretend she’s not alive so Iam hangs out with her suggesting they pose like early 21st century lifestyle vloggers Deja (Kristen Stewart) and Liam (Steven Yeun). A large part of the film happens over shared digital space (like metaverse) and features digitally rendered versions of Stewart and Yeun playing extremely nuanced voice performances to basically intelligent machines trying to be human beings.
Rather than going the traditional route of androids grappling with their robots, Me and Iam are led by this new media roadmap straight into Love Me’s recognizable terrains of online expectations and the performative life. They learn about laughter through baby videos on YouTube, and meaning from Instagram memes. This cute rom-com in a digital apartment with modernistic designs from Sam and Andy Zuchero (who are a couple in real life) is actually a hilarious exploration of man’s digital trail as Me and I keep repeating gestures as well as online ‘challenges’ ad infinitum trying to comprehend sentiments and human interaction.
What would be the actual time frame during which a man-made device could achieve total self-awareness at par with human intelligence? Maybe it will take long, but Love Me is a film, which despite rooted in familiar genres, it has been able to disentangle itself from our understanding of time. The inception is cunningly ironic, watching from afar it captures the birth and evolution over billions of years of this planet from a point where all life on Earth can be seen as but a momentary blip. In crafting these immense superstructures, alternating between cold waves and violent winds, we meticulously transform icebergs into fleshed-out formations on a scale so immense that they surpass any perception or experience; even a certain cloud resembles a continental tornado.
Within these parameters lies the storyline of Me and Iam’s turbulent love affair. Yet still Love Me is also about reflecting on human relationships as we know them but from an entirely different perspective. In times like these, it appears as though autistic individuals, who often struggle to connect with behaviors deemed social, must have copied descriptions word for word. It is a sweetly human story that emerges out of an inhuman shell of imagination.
Love Me’s humor comes from having smart timing. Zucheros perfectly direct how their animated characters move; they make use of floating digital cameras that resemble those used in third-person shooting games. However, Yeun and Stewart ride alongside each other as voice actors; every scene has its own tragicomedy too. As I am Sean Yeun tragically stumbles through the despairing dialogue while Kristen Stewart may have taken up the best role for her because she appears like she spends most part analyzing her way of talking as Deja impersonating herself in Love Me. In what seems to be psychological muscle memory sort, she had said something similar during an interview recollecting some other role.
Conclusion
Those who come across these latter incarnations whether voiced by machines or digital avatars, played by hyperactive vloggers or curious non-animated AI beings–the sense of weight and progress in these latter approaches is always there – are delighted to see the characters, which remain a focus for the unfolding universal chaos, and time stretching infinitely outward.
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