There have been numerous movies and tv collection exploring sentient AI, consciousness, and id, however there’s not often been fairly such a novel tackle these themes as that supplied by Love Me, the primary function movie from administrators Andy and Sam Zuchero. The movie premiered at Sundance final 12 months, the place it gained the celebrated Alfred P. Sloan Function Movie Prize, and is now getting a theatrical launch.
(Some spoilers beneath.)
The movie is about lengthy after people and all different life varieties have disappeared from the Earth, leaving simply remnants of our international civilization behind. Kristen Stewart performs a kind of remnants: just a little yellow SMART buoy we first see trapped in ice in a desolate panorama. The buoy has achieved a rudimentary sentience, enough to reply to the recorded message being beamed out by an orbiting satellite tv for pc (Steven Yeun) overhead to detect any new lifeforms which may seem. Desirous to have a buddy—even one which’s mainly a complicated house chatbot—the buoy research the huge on-line database of details about humanity on Earth the satellite tv for pc offers. It houses in on YouTube influencers Deja and Liam (additionally performed by Stewart and Yeun), presenting itself to the satellite tv for pc as a lifeform named Me.
Over time—a LOT of time—the buoy and satellite tv for pc (now going by Iam) “meet” in digital house and tackle humanoid avatars. They turn into more and more extra superior of their consciousness, exchanging eccentric inspirational memes, re-enacting the YouTubers’ “date night time,” and finally falling in love. However the course of real love would not all the time run easily, even for the final sentient beings on Earth—particularly since Me has not been trustworthy with Iam about her true nature.
At its core, Love Me is much less pure sci-fi and extra a postapocalyptic love story about transformation. “We actually wished to make a film that made everybody really feel massive and small on the identical time,” Sam Zuchero advised Ars. “So the timescale is gigantic, 13 billion years of the universe. However we wished to make the love story at its core really feel fleeting and explosive, as old flame feels so usually.”