I’m a bit over the moon here, as it’s not often when one of your favourite films is displaced. In this case, Tarkovsky’s own Solaris. I absolutely adored Solaris for its humanistic take on the hard Sci-Fi nugget of illusion and projection. While I haven’t seen the interceding Mirror, which I’ve seen here has lots of love, it almost seems like Stalker is a follow up fuck-you to Stanley Kubrick. Solaris had a humanistic take on great sci-fi questions, although it was less grand is scope compared to Kubrick’s masterpiece. Here, Tarkovsky matches Kubrick in grand scope and interpretation.

This film is impossible to interpret on a single viewing, so I’m just going to register some first takes and let…

There has been much inquiry over the past thirty five years or so as to what this film is about - the three faces of the human soul, perhaps? Spirituality? Mortality?

"How would I know the right word for what I want? How would I know that actually I don't want what I want? Or that I actually don't want what I don't want? They are elusive things: the moment we name them, their meaning disappears, melts, dissolves like a jellyfish in the sun."

As with the rest of Tarkovsky's masterpieces, there isn't much of a point in trying to write a review for Stalker. Any attempt to put your thoughts on this film into words will remove something special,…

This is the Tarkovsky I've been waiting for.

As conceptually interesting as Solaris and visually stunning as Andrei Rublev were, there was something missing; a connection to the story and characters that sucked me into the world, that made me desperate to discover the 'why' instead of just going along for the ride. Here, in Stalker, I got my wish - an apocalyptic fairy tale with characters I could understand and a true sense that Tarkovsky is, indeed, one of the greats and can produce a film I instantly want to return to; love at first sight. After a good night's sleep, my brain is still bouncing off the walls about it, so instead of coherency, here's two of the…

70s Ranked 👍

Appealing to the mystical with a striking zeal that at times feels as though a picturesque novel with a haunting atmosphere, Stalker is a tale about the perpetual conflict between reason and sentiment, mind versus heart, and art against science.

To say that I’ve understood the exact nature of the Zone and the entirety of the narrative is simply pretentious. But the film is accomplished and written with a huge depth and eloquence--a well-realized post-apocalyptic sci-fi that uncovers the spiritual and philosophical realities that are ubiquitous in humanity and abstract at implications. Its pretenses and banality creates a feeling that there is something inconceivable in the world, that something is outlandishly absent in reality and that it’s…

"You dream of one thing, but you get quite another."

Stalker is incredibly complex and fairly impenetrable on first watch, so as a result this will be a combination of surface level analysis and dubious conjecture. Needless to say, this is exactly my brand of science fiction: it's heady, it's beautiful, it's unique. It's a film I don't expect I'll fully grasp without reading external analysis, and even then it's so open for interpretation that I hope to never have a completely solid idea of what it means. As the Stalker says, "Hardness and strength are death's companions."

The most obvious thing about Stalker is that it's gorgeous. It presents a dystopian post-industrial vision of Russia which lies in the…

I know this will not be a popular opinion, but I did not like this film.

I found it a crushingly ponderous existential meditation.

The film's plot is about a man who is a "stalker". This means that he is a bit of a tour guide to a location or realm called "the zone". The Zone is explained in the film, but only vaugely. We know it is supposed to be a place where wishes come true. The stalker is taking two people to the zone. One is a writer, and the other is a professor. The three men make the voyage to the zone, pausing along the way to ruminate on the meaning of life.

One of my problems…

I can't help but think that I would follow every rule the Stalker gave me just to get to the Room. My deepest darkest desires fulfilled, what fantasies return again and again to me, I would fight for these, I would walk whatever line they made me walk. A healthy, happy world is worth the price of following a few rules, even if I do not necessarily understand them. The toxic ideas of freedom set forth by slave owners and rapists have left a legacy of lies in our nation wherein we constantly strive to be "free" while being held in--and reinforcing--chains of poverty, sickness, and violence; this idea that we should have the right to hate-speech or private property…

There’s so much to dissect and discuss and ponder about in this film that it excites me and depresses me that I won’t even come close to figuring out this film.

•The close ups: A nod to Ingmar Bergman? Tarkovsky has said that he is fond of Bergman’s work and vice versa.

•The Sepia: have no idea what this means.

•The push in\zooms?: I have trouble telling the difference between the two but they caught my eye immediately as they were frequent throughout the picture.

•The use biblical scripture: That resonated with me given my religious background. Especially that tracking shot where the camera moves over a puddle with the voice over narration quoting the book of Revalations. It then…