Kristen Stewart & Steven Yeun Lead Tedious AI Romance

It’s hard to say what’s more impressive: That a married filmmaking duo made a romantic drama that covers 13.7 billion years and climaxes with a buoy fucking a satellite, or that Sam and Andy Zuchero’s debut feature — a tedious movie that gradually squanders all of the goodwill earned by the creative ambition behind it — somehow manages to feel trite and predictable in spite of that premise. 

As much as I respect the chutzpah required to jump directly from short films to what might be the longest-spanning love story ever told, time ironically proves to be the undoing of a movie about two star-crossed pieces of metal who can’t even feel it pass. Their struggle to keep things interesting for several million millennia reflects the Zucheros’ struggle to keep things interesting for 92 minutes, as “Love Me” — not unlike the zombie relationship it follows to infinity and beyond — quickly begins to lose its reason for being once it outgrows the big idea at its core. 

As Charlie Kaufman might say: We open at the beginning of time. The Earth erupts from a floating mass of colorless metal and begins to spin forward at the proverbial speed of light, going from a billion years ago to the 21st century in a matter of seconds. We see how briefly human civilization was alive during that span, and we reflect on how important it seemed to us at the time. It all goes poof! In 2027, when an unspecified extinction-level-event (or E.L.E., as “Deep…