- Since Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker apparently completely fried my brain, allow me to begin this review by noting the following things that my addled mind currently finds really funny:
- 1) Tarkovsky was once quoted as saying that the film "needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts."
- 2) NYU held a cinema interruptus-type event earlier this year in which they watched Stalker. For people who thought the original went by a little too quickly!
- 3) They made several video games loosely based on Stalker. The very concept is amazing.
- Whew, now that we've had a few laughs, let me just say that this was one of the most intolerably dull and excruciating films I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through. If it were not for the fact that Tarkovsky and company obviously possess a great deal of talent for scouting interesting locations and composing and lighting shots, his work surely would have been relegated to the cinematic dustbin or Mystery Science Theater 3000. Actually, on second thought, his films' prohibitive lengths would disqualify them from the MST3K treatment.
- In short, the film follows a "Stalker" (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) who leads a "Writer" (Anatoliy Solonitsyn) and a "Professor" (Nikolay Grinko) into an area known as "The Zone." Let's just say that you would never confuse this Zone with The Twilight Zone, which was generally pleasantly concise, immensely creative, thoroughly enjoyable, and often cleverly satirical. No, this Zone is a place where Stalker navigates in the most meandering and uncertain way imaginable while the forces of nature or magic or UFOs or whatever may or may not be watching. Along the way, the three travelers engage in a multitude of conversations, each of which manages to sound philosophical without actually making any sense. The goal is to reach a special room in which the travelers' wishes would be granted, although it's never really clear that such a room or any of this is anything but a complete imagining.
- In a trick that dates back to at least 1939, the Zone is magically colorized whereas the outside world is bleak and monochrome. Both, however, are littered with human detritus of all possible shapes and sizes. Capturing these creepy scenes of urban wreckage and technological decay (filmed on location in Estonia) is by far the film's greatest accomplishment. If such images had been presented as a set of photographs, I would gladly have pored over them. I would not, however, have wanted to look at them for as long as Tarkovsky does, and I certainly never would have wanted to sit through some of the most abstruse and obfuscated musings I've ever heard uttered by any character in any film. Ultimately, Stalker illustrates the difference between a film based solely on ideas and those that have the courtesy to follow up those ideas with more rigorous thoughts. Maybe Tarkovsky would have agreed, but damned if I know or care.
- I don't know how much of this to believe, but there are claims that the pollutants encountered in this film killed several of its participants eventually, including Tarkovsky. The whole thing nearly killed me, too.
