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PLOT AND EXPLANATION OF THEMES The film is set in a not-too-distant future, a time where the world has been rendered nearly uninhabitable, due to humanity's over-industrialisation, chemical and nuclear pollution of the atmosphere, and the ravages of an unspecified war, currently being fought. "The Zone" is a dead, ochre-coloured wasteland of buried junk and radiation, a result of this pollution and war. When a nomadic loner known as a "Zone Tripper" (played by Carl McCoy) discovers the scattered parts of a droid out in the desert, he takes them to an unamed city where they are sold into the possession of failed soldier Moses Baxter (played by Dylan McDermott). The parts, which are later revealed to belong to a faulty prototype M.A.R.K-13 combat droid, are given by Baxter to his live-in girlfriend Jill (played by Stacy Travis) as a Chritmas gift. Jill, who lives in a bleak and overcrowded apartment block, is a struggling artist, using metal for her creations. The head of the droid is later incorporated into Jill's latest work of art. The M.A.R.K-13, which is programmed, if damaged in combat, to repair and rebuild itself using the nearest available metal and electronic machinery and parts, is activated (it is never explained how) and does just that, augmenting Jill's tools, machinery, wiring, her art into a new form; and, with the reconstructed droid in control of Jill's fortress-like apartment security system (effectivley trapping Jill alone in her own apartment with it), the M.A.R.K-13 attempts to do what it was created to do- destroy human life. JILL AND THE M.A.R.K-13 The character played by Stacey Travis is the person who must hide and outwit the droid as it roams her darkened apartment(reconstructed with parts of the very technology she uses for her life in the flat, her art) in search of it's kill. The scenario concerned not only plays into the film's idea of compounded slow death by mankind's excessive reliance on industry and technology, but also sexual violence. The augmented drill it uses as a weapon moves up between her legs in a scene where she is temporarily captured by the M.A.R.K-13. An earlier backdrop in plot informs the viewer of a national population crisis, vagualy defined by news reports and conversations Jill has with her lover Moses. The new Population Control Bill proposed by an unidentified government seeks to give the warring nation a "clean break for procreation". A situation of sanctions that involve limits on the number of children a family can produce, sterilisations for those with genetic deficiancies caused through too much exposure to the dying, polluted world, and the levy of fines, including the taking away of ration coupons to those with too many children. Unlike other films where the fight is between man and machine, but against the threat of technology for the safety and conservation of what is already there, in Hardware, humanity has gone too far already. It's reliance on technology and the use of natural resources has devastated the earth to the point of no going back. The M.A.R.K-13 is man's creation, a bringer of death, a "little apocalypse", it's name a chapter from the New Testament in the Christian Holy Bible that tells portentiosly of an end- "and no flesh shall be spared". |
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