Hoo buoy. ‘Love Me’ is a very silly sci-fi love story

Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun look for love at the end of the world

We’re told that cockroaches will survive a nuclear apocalypse, but “Love Me” suggests that one other thing might outlast us – our social media accounts. (Yikes.)

Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s slick and silly sci-fi romance opens with a prologue (“5,000,000,000 years ago,” reads the title card) which rapidly runs through the creation of the Earth and eventually, it’s self-inflicted demise. Clearly, this is a movie that does not shy away from big swings.

A couple of centuries from now, give or take, the planet is frozen and uninhabited. Except for an abandoned smart buoy launched centuries ago to monitor the ocean. Now trapped in the ice, the buoy slowly flickers to life. Confused about what happened to the human race, the buoy manages to connect with the now dormant internet, especially the YouTube videos of a peppy vlogger named Deja (Kristen Stewart).

The buoy becomes obsessed with Deja’s videos as a relic of what humanity must have been like (there’s a bit of social commentary here on the misleading nature of social media, but only a bit). When she connects with another lonely machine, a satellite orbiting the planet, the buoy excitedly suggests that they learn about being human by recreating the relationship between Deja and her partner Liam (Steven Yeun).

It’s charming in a very “Wall-E” way to see the two machines, separated by thousands of miles, learning how to communicate. But when they “upgrade” to become animated “metaverse” characters, the film becomes a lot less visually interesting. It’s only in the last half hour that Yeun and Stewart actually appear on screen.

(Photos courtesy of Bleecker Street)

The Zucheros seem to be aiming for the same territory as “Her” or “Marjorie Prime,” using artificial life forms as a device for examining what makes us human. And I think there’s definitely an intriguing short film to be made of the idea, as the two machines fall in love (or at least a simulation thereof) and start experiencing the full breadth of what that really means.

It becomes pretty clear early on that “Love Me” doesn’t have a feature-length film’s worth of ideas to sustain it, and you can feel the intellectual “low battery” indicator come on after 30 minutes or so. Yeun and Stewart seem to be enjoying the acting exercise of playing machines slowly learning to become human.

But the script is so shallow, and the characters such blank slates, that there’s not much under there to support them. There are times when I wondered if “Love Me” is a film about AI approximating being human made by AI approximating a film made by humans.

“Love Me” is now in theaters. In Madison, it’s playing at AMC Fitchburg 18.