An interesting look at the remnants of humanity as filtered through the lonely AIs we leave behind
Love Me is a quirky little film set long after the demise of humanity, in which two human-made pieces of technology fall in love. Well, kind of. Artificial intelligence, as far I can tell, can't really produce human emotions, so instead they approximate, imitate, and try to make sense of connection, disappointment, and feelings of warmth as memorialized by the extinct humans that made them.
A lonely smart buoy, known as Me, and a distant satellite, referred to as Iam, somehow connect as the last two pieces of human-made tech to function. The satellite revolves around Earth's graveyard of a planet, launched into space purposefully with petabytes of human data, information, videos, and other relics as a sort of eternal gravemarker of the civilization that once populated the planet—a stationary Voyager 1, as it were.
This concept alone is a fantastic start, but the movie gets a little complicated, and perhaps bites off more than it can chew, conceptually. The two AIs begin to communicate, and Me (the buoy) pretends to be a life form.
They interact via social media and memes, and even "move in" together in a digital space as video-game-esque avatars. The issue, of course, is that despite watching influencer videos of date nights and relationships, neither being really knows what it is to be human. And social media, unfortunately, is perhaps one of the worst ways to learn about authenticity and experience.
Me and Iam eventually have a falling out, and after a title card reveals that a billion years passes, they eventually reconnect—and Iam has shifted from cartoonish avatar to real-life physicality. The only two characters in Love Me are played in all forms by Kristin Stewart and Steven Yuen, and they both do an extraordinary job in portraying surprisingly human artificial intelligences. If you're a fan of either, you'll be very entertained watching them in such a strange movie.
My favorite part of the film is perhaps an unintended —or if not unintended, not the primary focus— idea that the real essence of humanity isn't in the grand, sweeping events and monumental life decisions. It's in the little things we do every single day, ad nauseam. It's similar to David Foster Wallace's "This is water" speech, namely that "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." When Iam spends a billion years alone, he fills his time with little things that make up a big life, as well as small sensory pleasures that make life worth living. Eating ice cream, building IKEA furniture, doing chores, dancing.
When the two reconcile, as Earth's sun turns supernova, they launch out into the solar system, happy to be together experiencing life in all of its forms, which is the ultimate epitaph to humanity.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
