LOVE: very void of emotion

I am still trying to understand what the full concept for LOVE was. 

The main storyline is simple enough: man in solo space station loses connection to Earth and begins to unravel as years pass and he remains in complete solitude; but I did not understand very much about the execution of this story. 

First off, this movie began to take form almost five years ago when the band Angels and Airwaves asked director William Eubank to make a film inspired by their music. As Eubank began working on a script that was music driven, not plot, he began to expand on it more until it became a feature length more complex then what he had began. Eubank basically spent the next four years building a space station set in his parent’s driveway with supplies he purchased at Home Depot. Considering the low budget the set does look impressive and I was amazed when I heard the director talking about the creative ways he made the set. Still, a well made set fails to make up for a weak script.

I would say that LOVE fails on every level. It opens with a Civil War segment that did not seem connected to the rest of the film. Neither did the four random interviews of men talking rather broadly about their feelings of isolation placed throughout the film. The movie seems to suggest these are archival footage, remaining fragments of the, perhaps, extinct Earth population, but I failed to find any value in them. Instead they fell flat and confused me. 

The score is fine, but not particularly exciting.  Considering the band's music was the inspiration for this film I had expected much more of a musical heavy, eye candy type of art film, but there are hardly any segments in the film put to music. It is almost always background, playing subtly in the back while our star spaceman pushes buttons and looks worried in his small station.

 At no time in this movie did I feel the theme of isolation was explored intelligently. Since we never see our lead have any kind of human interaction it is hard to understand what was lost for him when all communication ended.  I would have found it much more interesting if the entire movie had been just him, in his space station, slowly losing it. Maybe then the audience could have experienced his feelings of isolation, if we too were forced to endure the claustrophobia of his lonely destiny.

We see little of this man’s past, there is nothing personal about his story.  (We get one short video of his brother telling him he is an uncle, and fantasy moments of a sexy woman on all fours in a thong with wind blowing around her hair.  Original!)  Since the man is left very undeveloped I can only assume that he is meant to represent a broad sense of humanity. Trying to suggest this is a universal story is ludicrous since the only voices heard are white, male Americans saying next to nothing. I am a fan of open-ended films, but there needs to be at least one element of any art film that excites you, bothers you or stays with you. LOVE left next to no impression on me.