Hardware (dir. Richard Stanley, 1990)
An initially uncredited adaptation of a story published the venerable British comics magazine 2000 AD, Hardware is a post-apocalyptic science fiction/horror hybrid about a scavenged robot wreaking havoc on the inhabitants of an apartment complex.
Dylan McDermott, who I feel obliged to mention I have never once had trouble differentiating from Dermot Mulroney like seemingly everyone else on the planet, is Moses “Hard Mo” Baxter. He is a standard figure for the genre: an ex-soldier with a cybernetic hand, eking out a living buying and selling metal scraps and broken tech from the desert wastes. His girlfriend Jill, however, is something I have never once seen featured in a story like this: a sculptor and working artist.
To me, that’s the fascinating thing about Hardware. It is one of the more functional post-apocalyptic societies you’ll see in film. Populated cities with high rises, television and radio broadcasts, a government still able to levy taxes and provide denizens with welfare checks. There’s still manufacturing and agriculture. You can buy tobacco and coffee, but have to settle for “lactoplasm” and “synth-milk.” Hell, there’s an art market for Jill to see her sculptures. Sure, there are wide swaths of radioactive wasteland, temperatures are topping 110 degrees before nightfall as Iggy Pop’s radio DJ helpfully informs us–not that this stops anyone in the film from dressing solely in leather jackets and woolen coats. Mo and Jill are debating the cruelty of bringing children into this broken world, but things could be worse.
Much of this comes from the original comic, which as far as I can tell takes place within the same setting of Judge Dredd and it’s easy to imagine the unnamed metropolis here as Mega City One, albeit on a tight budget.
The first half of the film is devoted to this character development and world building before sidling into a taut horror story. Jill has to contend at first not only with what turns out to be an experimental military prototype called the M.A.R.K. 13, a heavily armed and self-repairing robot. Her neighbor (William Hootkins, best known perhaps as the unfortunately named X-Wing pilot Jek Porkins) is also a lecherous creep, harassing her and making her take extreme measures to fortify her frankly enormous apartment. It’s a way to keep the film confined to one set, but it’s an acknowledgment of a common danger for women. No matter how stylized the setting or direction gets, there’s always some degree of verisimilitude.
You know, like climate change, global nuclear war, and autonomous killer drones that will slaughter us all.
The film’s writer/director Richard Stanley is an odd man, for those unfamiliar with him. A South African anti-apartheidist with a background in anthropology, he made his reputation first making music videos and produced a documentary while embedded with the Taliban in the Soviet-Afghanistan War. He’s best known for producing the screenplay for The Island of Dr. Moreau that starred Marlon Brando as the titular character and Val Kilmer as Marlon Brando. The shitshow of a production is detailed in the highly recommended 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s a shame that Dr. Moreau derailed his promising career, but at least we have this pretty good killer robot movie.
October 8, 2018
oliveresque 