Hardware

The future in the world of Hardware is metal and not just because the film features cameos by Iggy Pop as a radio D.J. named Angry Bob and Lemmy as a taximan who plays Motorhead for his passengers. 

Cities have been reduced to rusting wastelands of decaying buildings and infrastructure, mechanicals limbs are common enough to go unmentioned, and government-built robots with a mission to sterilize the human race will soon be deployed en masse. 

Meanwhile, the desert now called Earth shows few signs of life. Humans struggle to survive this harsh, unforgiving planet, everything looks dirty and crowded, and fragile flesh is prone to disease, disfigurement, and genetic malformities. In the looming battle between man and machines, the machines hold all the advantage.

In this post-apocalyptic world, presumably irradiated by a nuclear exchange, soldier Moses "Mo" Baxter (Dylan McDermott) buys the remains of a robot from a mysterious nomadic scavenger and gives it to his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis), an artist. Jill turns the robot into a sculpture, but what they don't know is the robot is the remains of the M.A.R.K. 13, a self-repairing killbot built by the government.

When it activates inside Jill's apartment, it immediately targets her. Mo, called away to learn more about the deadly gift he unwittingly gave his girlfriend, struggles to get back in time to save her. Her only immediate help is the friendly, spaced-out Shades (John Lynch), who picked a terrible time to trip on drugs, and neighbor Lincoln Wineberg Jr. (William Hootkins), a disgusting, creepy voyeur who uses infrared cameras to peep on Jill and Mo when they have sex and harasses her with obscene phone calls.

"No flesh shall be spared." It's a passage Mo reads in the Bible, but it also serves as the defining principle of Hardware. The M.A.R.K. 13, when it repairs itself and incorporates bits and pieces it finds in Jill's apartment, proceeds on a single-minded mission to try to exterminate any person it comes across. It doesn't matter whether if the people are good, bad, or anything else; there's no room or resources left to preserve all of humanity, and the robot kills all in the name of a government population control program.

When the machine gets a hold of a victim, it dispatches them with one of two methods. First, it can inject them with a powerful hallucinogenic drug that eventually kills them. Or, it can rip them to pieces with assorted metal claws and blades, tearing through human flesh with ease. It's not pretty either way.

Most of the film takes place in Jill's apartment, or at least, the meat of the action occurs there. The movie takes its time establishing its nihilistic world and its strange, surreal tone, but once the M.A.R.K. 13 activates, the movie becomes a tense, claustrophobic thriller as Jill fights for her life. Her apartment had been her sanctuary from the apocalypse around her, but it was doomed to always be invaded.

Hardware plays like a fever dream hallucination comprised of equal parts Mad Max, The Terminator, and Judge Dredd. It's filled the brim with grime, squalor, and grunge, but visually, it feels like a waking nightmare: strobing lights of intense color (especially a scorching red), dream-like transitions, and slow motion during the robot attacks that elongate the feeling of trapped terror. 

Even the scenes we see of the wasteland have a haunting effect. The lifeless desert the scavenger roams and finds the M.A.R.K. 13 in has a otherworldly quality to it but also feels epic and is stunning to look at it. It is beautiful in its ugliness.

The film is a contained story with only a handful of characters, but it's awash with environmental details and hinted character backstories. As a result, it feels bigger in scope than the summary suggests. Watching Hardware is akin to watching a poisoned, dying world. Plants and animals are almost nonexistent, the unseen government builds an army of killer robots and a society of mass surveillance to control the population, and of the people who survived nuclear are physically, emotionally, or mentally damaged. This is a world without hope.

Hardware is nasty little thriller. The plot is fairly limited and uncomplicated, but the visual flair and nightmarish atmosphere, not to mention its intense and gory set pieces, result in a genuinely gruesome, heavy metal apocalypse.