Stalker

Stalker (1979) is the 8th film from famous Soviet filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, who helmed the original Solaris (1972), a film that many hailed as Russia's answer to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I haven't seen Tarkovsky's Solaris, but Stalker sure bears a resemblance to 2001 in my book: it's so obtuse, complicated, and dense as to be virtually unwatchable.

The film opens in washed-out sepia on an unnamed city, the home of Stalker, a man with a very unusual profession. Stalker is one of only a handful of men with the skills, guts, and knowledge to serve as guide in the Zone, a mysterious and heavily guarded area formed by an equally mysterious apocalyptic disaster. The Zone is rumored to contain a magical room with the power to grant men their deepest desire, and so Stalker makes his living leading desperate men through the perils of the Zone to the holy grail that is the room.

Stalker's latest clients, Writer and Professor, are a failed novelist and a disgraced professor or physics. As they journey deep into the Zone in search of the room, Writer and Professor soon learn the perils of the Zone. The place seems to have a will of its own, and it is distrustful of outsiders. Failure to adhere to a very specific and complex protocol while traversing the Zone could likely result in death. The Zone rearranges itself periodically, and you can never go back the same way you came, or follow the same path twice. Will the three men survive to reach the room, and what will they find once they enter?

Something tells me this material worked much better in its original form, the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. But as a movie, there is just way way way too much exposition, too much talking and not enough doing. Tarkovsky takes Quentin Tarantino's penchant for heady exposition and random philosophical asides and raises it to the nth degree. And this carries on for almost 3 full hours! I guess the tendency for huge unassailable fiction in Russian culture extends to cinema as well as novels.

It was doubly disappointing because there were times that I had finally gotten into the movie, and some tension had built and it felt like maybe something cool was about to happen, but then Tarkovsky would go and ruin it again with another 5 minutes of random philosophical blathering. JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY!

Honestly, I was confused for much of the film as to what in the hell was going on. The story slipped around in time and in and out of dreamlike sequences so abruptly that it was hard to follow the action (what little there was of it). I understand that there is a whole mountain of symbolism contained in this movie, most of it conveyed in the various highly-detailed sets, but it is much too subtle and I know much too little about Russian history and culture. It seems obvious that much of this film must be a commentary on Communism, but that's like saying that the ocean has fish. Technically true, but descriptively meaningless.

As for the Zone itself, the obvious corollaries are a nuclear blast zone, or more likely, given the setting and the time period, a nuclear meltdown, such as the one that took place near Chelyabinsk in 1957. The infamous disaster at Chernobyl would not take place for some 7 years after the release of the film, imbuing Stalker with an eerie prescience.

American science fiction author Samuel Delaney would employ a similar locale in his masterpiece, Dhalgren, published 3 years after Roadside Picnic but 5 years before the release of Stalker. In Dhalgren, the protagonist explores Bellona, the recombinant city, isolated from the world by a disaster of unknown origin. Within Bellona, the natural laws of physics and astronomy no longer apply; the city is sentient, and schizophrenic, and nothing is ever arranged in the same way twice.

Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997) may also have been influenced by Tarkovsky's Zone. In the film, the eponymous cube is a similarly mysterious realm, full of traps, tricks, and recombinant rooms, making each journey into its depths a unique occurrence.

It is true that the cinematography and set design in Stalker are exquisite, some of the best I've ever seen. The movie is gorgeous, from the grainy and overexposed sepia used for shots outside the Zone, to the hypersaturated long shots bursting with color and meaning used to represent the Zone. The sets, particularly within the Zone, are painfully intricate. To say that this movie is visually beautiful would be an understatement. But alas, beauty does not a film make. In the end, I might recommend this film to a cinemaphile for the technical prowess alone, but the casual movie watcher would likely not enjoy it.

Storyline & plot: 4/10
Cinematography & effects: 9/10
Music & mood: 4/10
Performances: 5/10

The Reverend says: 5/10