Post-apocalyptic machine dread with an industrial-adjacent texture. A self-repairing combat robot reactivates in a scavenger's apartment; the soundtrack and visual grime sit squarely in the industrial sensibility.
Why I keep it. The soundtrack is the connection, and it is unusually direct. Richard Stanley scores the film with industrial-and-adjacent music, including Ministry, whose Stigmata plays over an on-screen appearance by GWAR, and Public Image Ltd, whose Order of Death and its refrain "this is what you want, this is what you get" runs through the film. Ministry is set down in the archive; the tradition is not referenced here so much as used as the film's own voice.
Stanley came from music video, having directed clips for Fields of the Nephilim and Public Image Ltd, which is why the film carries the cameos it does: Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim as the nomad who finds the robot, Iggy Pop as the radio voice Angry Bob, Lemmy of Motörhead as a water-taxi driver. The post-apocalyptic grime, the self-repairing M.A.R.K. 13, the machine that reassembles itself and turns on its surroundings, is the machine-dread imagery the tradition has worked since the first wave.
The film belongs to no tradition figure, but its soundtrack and its world place it closer to the industrial scene than almost anything else in the influenced field. I keep Hardware for that soundtrack above all, a commercial genre film carrying the tradition's music as its own.
This film is placed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene