In a post-apocalyptic future, drifter Moses (Dylan McDermott) returns 'home' bearing a gift for his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis): scrap robot parts, collected from the wastelands, for use in her art. Unfortunately, these components turn out to be from a Mark 13, a prototype military killing machine capable of self repair; as Jill sleeps, the robot rebuilds itself using material from her sculptures and goes on a murderous rampage.
"A highly original, mind-melding, Cyberpunk, horror/sci-fi cult classic"—so claims the copy on the back of my Hardware DVD; whoever wrote that clearly wasn't aware of the legal action taken by comic strip duo Steve MacManus and Kevin O'Neill after they discovered that their 2000AD story 'Shok!' had been turned into a film without their knowledge (the film now boasts a rather pathetic admission of guilt after the end credits). In addition to this blatant case of plagiarism, Hardware's writer/director Richard Stanley is also guilty of plundering numerous sci-fi classics, most notably Bladerunner and The Terminator, for a variety of visual tidbits. So much for 'highly original'...
As far as 'mind-melding, Cyberpunk' is concerned, the film offers a lumbering piece of clumsily animated hardware that flails about wildly like a demented Johnny 5, a lot of brightly coloured lights, strobes and filters, and a few dodgy computer generated Mandelbrot fractals of the sort you can create in Photoshop in five minutes with the right plug-in, whilst shoe-horning in some ill-conceived religious subtext and weak social commentary—hardly visionary stuff that is going to radically alter my perception of the world.
Although a semi-decent score by Simon Boswell, a cool nightmarish sequence in which Mark 13 acts like a demented metallic DJ at a rave, and a couple of impressively gory death scenes (best being the gruesome bisection of one poor sod by a hydraulic door) provide a little fun and prevent the film from being a complete waste of time, I still find this film extremely disappointing as a whole and am totally mystified by the cult following it seems to have garnered.
"A highly original, mind-melding, Cyberpunk, horror/sci-fi cult classic"—so claims the copy on the back of my Hardware DVD; whoever wrote that clearly wasn't aware of the legal action taken by comic strip duo Steve MacManus and Kevin O'Neill after they discovered that their 2000AD story 'Shok!' had been turned into a film without their knowledge (the film now boasts a rather pathetic admission of guilt after the end credits). In addition to this blatant case of plagiarism, Hardware's writer/director Richard Stanley is also guilty of plundering numerous sci-fi classics, most notably Bladerunner and The Terminator, for a variety of visual tidbits. So much for 'highly original'...
As far as 'mind-melding, Cyberpunk' is concerned, the film offers a lumbering piece of clumsily animated hardware that flails about wildly like a demented Johnny 5, a lot of brightly coloured lights, strobes and filters, and a few dodgy computer generated Mandelbrot fractals of the sort you can create in Photoshop in five minutes with the right plug-in, whilst shoe-horning in some ill-conceived religious subtext and weak social commentary—hardly visionary stuff that is going to radically alter my perception of the world.
Although a semi-decent score by Simon Boswell, a cool nightmarish sequence in which Mark 13 acts like a demented metallic DJ at a rave, and a couple of impressively gory death scenes (best being the gruesome bisection of one poor sod by a hydraulic door) provide a little fun and prevent the film from being a complete waste of time, I still find this film extremely disappointing as a whole and am totally mystified by the cult following it seems to have garnered.