‘Nature never knew colours like this...’
Hardware emerged from the same primordial soup as Mad Max, Alien, Blade Runner and The Terminator in 1990 from the mind of first-time writer-director Richard Stanley. Incorporating cyberpunk, hard science fiction, and, erm… an obese voyeuristic lunatic, Hardware is the kind of film that really wasn’t intended for me. Let’s dig down into the reasons why…
Well, for starters, there isn’t much of a plot. This is very much a vibes film. Moses “Hard Mo” Baxter (Dylan McDermott) is a former soldier who becomes embroiled in the antics of a killer robot. That’s pretty much it.
Now, I won’t deny that for such a small budget film, Hardware looks great. Sure, it wears its influences on its sleeve, but then, so do most sci-fi films. What Stanley achieves here, all hellish cyberscapes and vibrant colours, is genuinely impressive. It should also be noted that Simon Boswell’s pulsating electronic score has aged beautifully, sounding at once both futuristic and very much tied to a specific moment in time. As a final plus point, any film that features Lemmy from Motorhead as the driver of a water taxi who plays his band’s song ‘Ace of Spades’ over the radio can’t be totally dismissed.
That being said, there is little semblance of a plot here, no memorable dialogue and a terminal lack of character development. None of the characters gives us a reason to care about them, which essentially renders Hardware as one long music video, an impressive music video, but a music video nevertheless. The MTV Blade Runner, if you will.
I admired the aesthetic of Hardware but found it to be very much style over substance. I’ll never think of it again.
