Hardware (1990)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1990
	Director: Richard Stanley
	Actors: Dylan McDermott (In the Line of Fire, Olympus has Fallen), Stacey Travis, John Lynch
	Country: USA, GB
	Genre: SF
	Conditions of visioning: 03.06.2017, Cinemateca Capitólio Petrobras, FANTASPOA2017
Synopsis: In an ultra-polluted future, Mo (McDermott) roams the desert searching for mechanical parts to sell. He returns to the city with a robotic skull that he offers to his girlfriend (Travis).
Review: This is the kind of movie of which I have always seen the cover in old video-clubs but never rented it even during the Horror days of my youth. I was expecting a cheap Terminator rip-off but it is nothing like that. First it doesn't look cheap, in fact almost less cheap that The Terminator. And then it is not a story of war between men and machines, but an anticipation of the future of our world in which food will be scarce and pollution omnipresent to the point that people stay locked at home and the government implements sterility programs to avoid the most irradiated ones to have children. We do spend more than half the movie following people and what they do in their daily life in this horrible world: scavenger like Mo, artist like Jill or tech expert. This peculiar character that is Richard Stanley (see picture below taken at Fantaspoa) wrote the story as a teenager, and it took some years for the Studios to see something in it and desperately look for the writer who was at that time fighting Russians in Afghanistan! He thus came back to the USA to direct his first film. The story is quite visionary: insecurity in the cities, deserted rural lands, video calls a-la-Skype, connected homes, and pollution everywhere to the point of affecting the continuation of our species. He imagined this pollution as radiations which were the big scare in the 80's because he couldn't imagine the chemical and biological waste now polluting our food and water, but he was close enough. Putting aside the dialogs and actors that I found rather poor, remains a Monster movie (I haven't talked about the robot yet but it is well done) in an enclosed space, quite slow to my taste but that concludes with 15 minutes of more colorful dreamy sequences (2001 influence?) that send the movie in another dimension. An interesting experience but better watched in good conditions like I did in order to stand the lengths. A poor copy with screeching sound would make you give up easily.
Rating: 4 /10 The one and only Richard Stanley.