Hardware (Film Review)

1990 Miramax
Written and Directed by: Richard Stanley
Starring: Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch, William Hootkins, and Iggy Pop
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 94 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 7/10

Mo roams the post-apocalyptic desert wastelands, looking for treasure to trade in for cash. He and his friend, Shades, find a busted down robot and take it back to a local junk dealer, where Mo sells all but the head. That, he decides to give as a peace-offering to his post-modern sculptor girlfriend, Jill, who has long been awaiting his return back home in their industrial cityscape apartment. However, the robot skull has other ideas. It was once part of a military killing machine. It quickly comes to life and starts scrapping electronics from the apartment to rebuild its body...and killing again.
Richard Stanley's 1990 cyberpunk horror-thriller, Hardware, is highly prescient. Featuring a government that doesn't want its citizens to breed, and that would rather spend money making robots to kill said citizens than improve life in any way for those citizens, there is plenty of commentary from 1990 that applies shockingly well to the Western World of the 2020's. Stanley's worldbuilding is fun, as Hardware gives glimpses of desert wastelands, Waterworld-predating ocean barriers, and nightmarish chemical plant cityscapes that look like a latter level in a Sonic the Hedgehog game. The main issue with the film is that, after moving around that world for the first half-hour, the next and final hour is set almost entirely in Mo and Jill's apartment. Sure, this is a more claustrophobic location in which to be murdered by an evil robot, but this unfortunately suddenly lowers the film to a much smaller scale, when it's already primed the viewer for a far more panoramic experience.
The performances here are solid, with an early career Dylan McDermott, injecting Mo with a confident swagger the character can't quite back up, and Stacey Travis imbuing Jill with toughness, grit, and vulnerability, which makes it all the more a shame that she didn't have a bigger career. On the periphery, perhaps due to Stanley's career directing music videos, are hip musicians from the time, like Iggy Pop as an angry DJ, or Lemmy as an enthusiastic water taxi driver. Stanley also uses his music video experience to ensure Hardware is full of memorable imagery, even on a $1.5 million budget (which may also explain its limited locations).
Hardware may be limited by its suddenly claustrophobic location shift, but it's an entertaining, surprisingly deep film. With the threat of AI looming, maybe the government-enabled, mankind-killing technology won't be robots after all...but close enough.