Love Me Review: Kristen Stewart And Steven Yeun's WALL-E Riff Doesn't Take Off
- The "WALL-E"-esque opening is fun
- Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are great voice actors
- Gaps in logic make it harder to empathize with characters
- The one-note influencer satire gets tiring
"Who am I?" To personally answer the question posed by the characters in "Love Me" about a billion times, I am, among other things, a sucker for a beautiful love story involving robots. "WALL-E" is my favorite Pixar movie, and "Her" made me experience every single emotion over Joaquin Phoenix's relationship with his smartphone. On paper, Sam and Andy Zuchero's debut feature film "Love Me" sounded exactly up my alley. The story of a buoy named Me (Kristen Stewart) and a satellite named Iam (Steven Yeun) bonding over the internet long after humanity's extinction combines the post-apocalyptic cuteness of "WALL-E" with the adult messiness of "Her." It was already an award winner before the Sundance Film Festival even began, picking up the festival's Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize for the best usage of science and technology. The casting of Stewart and Yeun was intriguing, as was the mysteriously promised combination of live-action and animation. The online screenings sold out almost immediately.
For the first half hour or so of the 90-minute movie, I'm completely on board. In space, five billion years of Earth's existence pass by in a few seconds. Human existence goes by in a blip (seems we all die around 2027 A.D.), and then we're left following the artificially intelligent buoy, brought to adorable not-technically-life with impressive practical props from LairdFX, all alone in the ocean. It notices the satellite, which calls out to any lifeforms that may find the dying planet as it passes by in the sky. The buoy is not a lifeform — and so it lies about being one to get the satellite's attention. The buoy, programmed with AI but left all alone, is self-aware but not knowledgeable; the satellite, containing the entire internet as a database of human history, contains knowledge but lacks self-awareness. Using the private search mode on internet connection provided by the satellite, the buoy constructs the identity of "Me," modeling it after an Instagram lifestyle influencer named Deja (also Stewart), and ropes the satellite, who she names "Iam," into inhabiting the role of Deja's boyfriend Liam (also Yeun), first through social media communications — a scene where Me teaches Iam how to meme is a comedic highlight — and then in some sort of virtual reality world. And it's here where the bold swing of "Love Me" starts to feel like a miss.
Trapped in an eternity of YouTube videos
The middle act of "Love Me" is set primarily in this virtual world, depicted through motion capture animation. The animation, produced by Kickstart Entertainment, is competent, with the mo-cap doing a good job capturing Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun's expressions. Compared to the combination of majestic landscapes and fast-paced screenlife comedy of the first act, however, using a medium of such limitless potential to spend time circling through the same YouTube video reenactment over and over again feels paradoxically limiting.
With this part of the story being less visually exciting and the comedy reduced to increasingly tired variations on the same one-note premise of influencers being fake, one's enjoyment becomes dependent primarily on how emotionally invested you are in Me and Iam's relationship. It's here where I have a lot of questions about these robots' psychologies. Yes, you can nitpick even the best movies about AI on similar grounds, and such nitpicking is even more tempting these days with so much of the technology currently being promoted as "AI" proving decidedly unintelligent, but it becomes a genuine stumbling block in "Love Me" when for so much of the film, it's unclear why things are even happening.
I get Me's thought process for the most part — it's not really explained why a buoy needs this level of artificial intelligence, but the movie presents her perspective vividly enough that her character arc basically makes sense. Iam, however, never really made sense to me. Logically, shouldn't an AI designed to interact with intelligent lifeforms be more sophisticated than one that wasn't? Despite having all human knowledge on hand, he doesn't have any curiosity about exploring it until suddenly he does, for reasons that are never really made clear. It's also unclear what his effect on the virtual reality world is — at one point he seems to be able to reshape it and ... he does so in the least creative way imaginable. And why do the robots suddenly develop a sense of taste in the VR world after so many jokes about them not being able to taste? When you're asking all these questions, it's hard to get emotionally invested.
A worthwhile effort that didn't quite pay off
In its final act, the virtual world has become "real" enough — either literally or symbolically — that Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are able to play their characters' avatars in live-action. 10 billion years pass, and the sun's going to swallow up the planet. Amidst this apocalyptic backdrop, Me and Iam play out some pretty typical romcom tropes while they continue to struggle with the formation of authentic identities. The latter is the story's most intriguing thematic concern, but one that still feels underexplored. There are a couple of moments where the presentation gets more imaginative, and I wanted more of that. Once the characters start questioning themselves, this could have gone in a more exciting direction akin to "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
I'm not mad at "Love Me," just disappointed. It's clear everyone involved in the film put in a lot of effort and passion, and that first act is really something impressive. If this was a short film, I might have loved it. Alas, the full-length "Love Me" is something of a failed experiment, one that makes you appreciate just what miracle movies "WALL-E" and "Her" really are. I respect Sam and Andy Zuchero's ambition and hope they will go on to make similarly ambitious but more consistently successful films in the future.
"Love Me" premiered on January 19 at the Sundance Film Festival.