Hardware (1990)
(In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) We all have our own list of movies to see, gathered over the years and passing interests along the way. I must have had Hardware on my own notional backlog since the early-1990s, as it was (at the time) one of the movies that most exemplified the nascent early-Internet cyberpunk style. (If this is incomprehensible to you, well, you weren’t reading the message boards at the time.) It took twenty-five years of not-so-assiduous searching, but I finally saw it. I can’t say that Hardware was worth the wait, but no matter – at least I’ve seen it now. Part of the problem is that there have been better movies on similar topics since then – whatever imaginative quality that the film may have had in the early 1990s has been outstripped several times over. What we’re left with is a woman-stalked-by-a-killer-robot story that’s strongly reminiscent of an entire subgenre. Writer-director Richard Stanley relies a bit too much on dated music video aesthetics, but it does help hide the relatively low budget of the production. At least Hardware does have the saving grace, underneath the CRT computer graphics and trash mechanical aesthetics, of competent execution. There are a few twists and turns in the story and while much of the film is bathed in darkness, the climax is set in a brightly lit shower that allows the robot design to shine. While the result isn’t particularly good by today’s standards, I can see what captured the imagination of my fellow cyber-geeks back then – it’s about as early-1990s cyberpunk dystopia as it gets, and that wasn’t quite the norm at the time, even if it has become somewhat of a cliché since then.