The new movie Love Me takes place over 10 billion years and stars solely two actors who don’t play humans. It’s half nature movie, half animation, half stage drama, and extremely bold and dense each in scope and theme. Written and directed by Sam and Andy Zuchero, it’s a movie that makes an attempt to seize your entire scope of celestial existence in a decent, 90-minute package deal, whereas additionally letting a contemporary viewers expertise it in a really particular manner. Does all of it work on a regular basis? No. However it works as a rule, and you’ll’t take your eyes off it since you are consistently in awe of what you’re seeing, for any variety of causes.
The 2 actors within the movie are Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun and so they play a bouy and a satellite tv for pc respectively. Sure, you learn that proper. Someday lengthy after people have gone extinct from Earth, these two objects are all that stay and, poetically and superbly, strike up a friendship. It’s right here the place the movie actually appears like Pixar’s masterpiece, Wall-E, right down to the robotic again and forths and sweeping, beautiful pictures of an empty Earth.
Love Me can be fairly boring, although, if it was merely two objects speaking to one another in voiceover. So whereas the film begins there, issues shortly evolve. The bouy creates an id, “Me,” and the satellite tv for pc chooses “I Am.” With everything of human existence accessible digitally, the 2 start studying, experimenting, and, ultimately, assembly in a digital metaverse as human avatars. As we stated, this film is exclusive.
As soon as Me and I Am meet, Love Me immediately will get extra complicated and divisive. The movie turns into a mirror of life in 2024 from a hopelessly harmless standpoint because the characters undertake the web personas of modern-day influencers (which is the place Yeun and Stewart primarily are available in). They start to stay life the way in which they see others did it on the web, blissfully unaware of how performative every little thing will be on-line. For these characters although, it really works, as a result of they’re know-how. They don’t have a real self so something is healthier than nothing. It’s a fascinating thematic conundrum.
After a primary act that appears like an episode of Planet Earth, the second act of Love Me is introduced largely as pc animation, which Stewart and Yeun carried out with movement seize. At first, it’s attention-grabbing, quirky, and enjoyable. You virtually can’t imagine the film went there. However ultimately, it goes on somewhat too lengthy and begins to really feel much less like a contemporary film and extra like watching somebody play a boring online game. Principally, it’s because the animation is so easy. It’s not unhealthy; in truth, it’s far more emotional and expressive than you’re most likely imagining. Nonetheless, it’s simply a lot much less detailed than what audiences are used to when it comes to animation or visible results lately. So, as a result of the sequence takes up an enormous chunk of the story, the format misplaced me a bit.
And, frankly, it by no means actually actually received me again. Whereas Love Me’s third act does get away from the animation and the character evolutions make whole logical sense, so many concepts are being juggled that it’s onerous to maintain up. Me is struggling together with her id, amongst different issues. I Am makes an attempt to uncover the reality of their meta-reality, whereas additionally making a world for himself. Each expertise life-changing existential crises. In the meantime, real-life time is passing on Earth and impacting every little thing. So we’re interested by the surroundings, the which means of self, the which means of life, what’s actual, what’s not, how we stay our personal lives, the permanence of digital identities, and on and on.
Neither the characters nor the movie ever totally grasp any of this. Which, when you consider it, is greater than comprehensible. Fortunately, the movie neatly focuses again on the romance at hand to convey all of it house. Stewart and Yeun, as one would possibly anticipate, are wonderful within the movie—they’re expressive, vibrant, damaged, and joyous. Every will get to indicate the total scope of human emotion from an entirely distinctive standpoint. And when Love Me is about that love and relationship, it’s at its finest. When it’s about one thing extra, it’s nonetheless fairly rattling good, however simply not as sturdy.
Love Me would possibly begin as a Wall-E adjoining story of what a romance between two objects could possibly be within the harshness of our actuality but it surely goes manner past that. It’s a movie not like something you’ve ever seen, for higher and worse, with an ambition and voice that’s all its personal. It’s rooted in science. It’s rooted in know-how. And it’s rooted within the perception that love, greater than something, is what makes life value residing. Love Me received’t be for everybody, however if you happen to take it for a journey, there’s no manner you’ll ever neglect it.
Love Me had its world premiere on the 2024 Sundance Movie Competition. It doesn’t but have distribution.
Need extra io9 information? Try when to anticipate the newest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on film and TV, and every little thing you should learn about the way forward for Doctor Who.
Trending Merchandise
