After a yearlong drought of news about Jennifer Lopez’s ninth studio album, This Is Me…Now, we’re basking in 2024, wetter than ever! So is J.Lo, if the trailer for the album’s cinematic visual accompaniment is anything to judge from. And I only say that because there’s a specific moment in this jam-packed teaser where Lopez’s friends host an intervention for her sex addiction.
That’s right: Lopez is baring it all (emotionally) in This Is Me…Now: A Love Story, which will combine the album’s music with out-of-this-world visuals fit for a Marvel movie—which is to say, it’s almost entirely CGI. But given that Lopez isn’t exactly known for her impressive videography, the movie could be a step in the right direction for her music career, after a full decade without a proper LP release. The film looks beyond corny, nauseatingly romantic, wildly dramatic, and downright earth-shattering. So, as far as I’m concerned, all of the things that make up the true human experience. This kind of schmaltzy melodrama is exactly what Lopez does best, and the whacked-out trailer is enough to have us fellow open-hearted lovers shouting from the rooftops.
The trailer starts with Lopez narrating to the viewer. “I know what they say about me,” she says over a shot of her riding on the back of a lover’s motorcycle—on top of a lake. (The “J” in “J.Lo” stands for “Jesus.”) “And [what they say] about hopeless romantics: that we’re weak. But I’m not weak.” Bold, golden text flashes across the screen, alerting us that what we’re about to see is from the “heart, soul, and dreams” of Jennifer Lopez. Fitting, since the bonkers phantasmagoric landscape that follows is reminiscent of the visuals from her 2000 film The Cell; perhaps Jenny really did learn how to enter into people’s unconscious minds to solve crimes! In this case, it seems to be a crime of passion.
I joke and I kid, but the striking accompanying orchestration and Lopez’s confident, powerful narration make this trailer legitimately gripping. Even if a good portion of this movie was indeed filmed against a green screen, the computer renderings are shockingly good for what is essentially a visual album. After this opening, we get a taste of the movie’s lighter side, which J.Lo served up to us last week in the video for the album’s first single, “Can’t Get Enough.” It’s a catchy song and a cute video, but only a mere taste of what’s to come in the remainder of This Is Me…Now: A Love Story.
And what the hell isn’t to come? Over the remainder of the trailer, we see Lopez basically working her way through a Christopher Nolan movie. At one point, she’s wearing an orange spacesuit and a pressurized spacewalk helmet, trying to repair a giant, malfunctioning mechanical heart that looks like it could blow up the world if it isn’t fixed. It’s Interstel-Lo. It’s J.LOppenheimer. Come on people—these are the jokes.
That kind of nutty metaphor is precisely what I crave from Lopez. I want music and visuals that suggest that, if a broken heart isn’t healed, it could potentially be ruinous to the planet as we know it. Because that’s what heartache feels like! Sure, this is all an outsized, histrionic take on love, marriage, aspiration, heartbreak, and fate. But I would rather consume those things in an earnest package like this than try to parse them out through the emotionally deficient script of a similarly CGI’d Marvel movie.
Things get even wilder toward the end of the trailer, when pulsating drums and theatrical violins soar over shots over dance numbers and set pieces that can only be described as Cloud Atlas-meets-RRR. There are flower petals. There are assembly lines. There are giant, Burning Man-esque sculptures. There is the promise of Ben Affleck and Kim Petras co-starring in the same movie. There’s a pesky hummingbird following Lopez around like she’s on the kind of odyssey one might find in a Zelda game. And truthfully, that’s not too far from what This Is Me…Now: A Love Story looks like!
While we won’t know the full story of this movie—including its runtime, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed it’ll surpass the length of The Irishman!—until it drops on Prime Video in tandem with the accompanying album Feb. 16, I will lay in sweet anticipation every day until then. Who will I become after I see this “intimate, cinematic, musical” experience? I can’t wait to find out.
