Robert Watched: Love Me

Robert’s Watchin It Score: 2/5    Must Watch It: 1/5

Overview

Released in 2024 starring Kirsten Stewart (Equals, Underwater, and Crimes of the Future) and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead and Invincible). Written and directed by Andrew Zuchero and Sam Zuchero.

Love Me spans the unknowable time between an apocalypse that wipes out organic life on earth and the expansion of the Sun into a red giant. During that time an advanced ocean buoy and automated satellite develop a bond as they grow self-awareness, learn what self means, and fall in love.

Review

(SPOILERS!)

Well, it is a movie, though sadly not a great one. There are some major issues with pacing, leading the story to spending far too long on some stages of the story and not enough on others.

The buoy (Stewart), later called Me, wakes in a frozen ocean after a nuclear winter clears enough for the Sun to activate its solar panels. “Shortly” after the buoy contacts a satellite (Yeun), later named Iam (I am) which was launched as a repository of human information for any future earth beings or aliens to find.

Both Kirsten Stewart and Steven Yeun did great jobs of portraying these complex characters.

The characters start out as code exploring the repository of information, progressing through various levels of CGI fidelity while emulating a couple from social media, and eventually becoming high-res fully conscious beings living in a virtual construct. The stages go very slow until they don’t, which makes for a difficult watch.

Academically I found the concept of 2 fledgling A.I.’s going through the steps of becoming fully fleshed out self-identifying beings and how the writers and directors chose to explore that concept very interesting, even if it was not a fun watch. While the story of a program becoming self-aware is not a new one, those stories usually include the involvement of already fully conscious beings interacting with them. I consider this movie a bit of a failure, but I do hope that the Zucheros get more chances to create more strange stories in the future.

Should you watch it

You can skip it. If you are really interested, I would suggest watching the first 30 minutes and the last 30 minutes.