Hardware (1990)

Hardware (1990)

4/10

 

Starring          

Dylan McDermott

Stacey Travis

John Lynch

William Hootkins

 

Directed by Richard Stanley

 

Imagine a movie about the future with no intro, no write-up of how we got to this dystopian setup, and you the viewer just watching, waiting for some kind of information about what is going on and why.

The movie starts with all these funny setups, with conversations going on about what is happening in front of you, which does no good, because I have eyes and I’m seeing what is happening. I’m more curious about how we got to this point.

I think the set design is not bad though. I like the way computers are still relevant in this future, but even they are falling apart, which adds to the decadence of this future. After all that, get ready for bad dialogue, a very slow-paced beginning, and a painfully obvious view of what a low-budget dystopian movie looks like. But I have to hand it to the production design and the director for their ingenuity in this production.

Halfway into this movie, it switches to what I can best describe as a Terminator-type vomit, like the writers liked what James Cameron did with Terminator and just wanted something like that in their film. There is so much going on in this movie that has no backstory or even reason.

Here is the plot. In this future, there are scavengers, and one of them is Moses, who goes to sell the things he picked up. There, he meets another scavenger who also brings his metal wares to sell. What he brought was like robot parts, which Moses buys off him and gives to a girl he likes, Jill. She lives in a form of self-isolation, constantly being disturbed and stalked. She likes her present, and Moses gets to stay the night. He gets a call telling him to bring the entire robot parts back. He leaves, leaving the robot part behind, then the robot self-repairs and goes after Jill, trying to kill her in her home. Moses gets to his dealer’s place to find him dead, suspects it has to do with the robot, and now has to get back to Jill to try and save her from what he does not yet understand.

It is funny how the above synopsis is the entire movie. I don’t know if I should have a spoiler alert in this review. There’s no point.

In the end, I was like meh. I struggled to fully grasp the fun this movie is supposed to offer. I didn’t like the acting, and the whole dark setup with bad light flashes trying to create a scary feel just made it hard to see what was happening. I was more irritated than impressed, by this claustrophobic badly lit movie.

I think some movies are best left unseen. This is one of them. It is best left unseen if you have not seen it yet.