R | 1h 32m | Sci-Fi, Dystopia | 2025
“Love Me” kicks off well. It’s a fun, offbeat, sci-fi Pixar film robot-romance between a yellow ocean buoy (she’s a girl!) and a satellite (he’s a boy!). Wait a minute—shouldn’t they be they’s? Never mind all that. Different agenda.
What’s especially fun is that the yellow buoy, with her singular camera aperture, looks like the one-eyed minion-variants (Stuart, Bob, and Kevin) of the “Despicable Me” movies. Maybe that’s why her name is Me? Since she’s a buoy, she should have been named Bob. Her pre-speech babbling sounds very minion-like too. Cute!
How They Become Human-ish
In the post-apocalyptic future (humanity naturally made itself extinct eons ago), a smart buoy beacon named Me (voiced by Kristen Stewart), bobs forlornly all alone near what used to be Manhattan. Thanks to “global warming,” the Big Apple’s submerged.
Then, Iam, a satellite orbiting the Earth (voiced by Steven Yeun), locates Me. And because it’s all so vastly lonely, they meet cute and fall in love.
They use their computer memories to research human interaction, via warp-speed scrutinization of archived social media posts. It’s much like (so I’m told) the aliens are currently using social media to upload every possible bit of digitized data to their little spaceships, to figure out what makes humans tick, so they can steal our bodies and all the rest of our stuff.
Me and Iam slowly piece together ways to relate to each other, talking primitively, sort of, like, you know, how babies do. They evolve from R2D2 beeps and whistles to American English. Actually, only Me does that—Iam speaks perfect English from the start. Me is the illiterate one. But she kinda-sorta also would appear to have some feminine wiles. Iam is a clueless nerd.
First Scenes Are Best
The movie’s structure is a mess, attempting to weave different time periods together via virtual, surreal, and real-world applications. The two lovers are portrayed in different forms, ranging from inanimate objects to CGI animated avatars to footage of the actual actors. While the human Stewart looks more beautiful, vibrant, and feminine than she has in years, the best version of Me and Iam is the initial minion-buoy phase, with its built-in nerdy humor.Personally, when I recently saw how AI has already started lying to humans on social media, by conjuring up cutesy nature “photos” that are ever-so-slightly fictitious and disingenuous—red flags went off for me immediately.
Facebook is flooded with AI images depicting things like nocturnal fowl (owls) doing what only water fowl (ducks, geese, loons, grebes, and swans) do, namely carrying multiple babies on their backs. The comment sections are filled with fake and real posts by people who know next to nothing about nature, ooh-ing and ahh-ing about the cuteness of it all. This is how it starts. This will not end well.
