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…

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…

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,…

"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…

Tarkovsky owns my ass. Stalker will always be #1 in my heart. One of the most visually and thematically captivating films to come out of the Soviet Union - Stalker is a captivating piece of low-key sci-fi, and to this day the best movie I have ever watched. The water in the scene when they are all resting is actually my tears.

The Zone itself is presented as a reflection of its visitors, the heart of the dynamically changing environment being the people that inhabit it. As the Stalker says to the two travelers, he does not know what happens in the Zone when there is no one there, only that the environment comes to life when someone sets foot…