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21

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,…

3

"My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?"

24

Woody Harrelson was amazing in this!

155

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 some first takes and let…

114

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…

26

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

7

No offense but it’s not really surprising that this movie gave a bunch of people cancer.

42

"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…

20

Very well might give this a higher star rating once I've chewed on it a bit but I just want to say (very mild spoilers) the reveal in the final scene almost made me scream in the theater

5

i have to declare that my missing wig has been found wondering about In The Zone™

4

finished it & was like “wow....” and then immediately made myself choke imagining a letterboxd review that was like “ummm bechdel fail!!!!”

6

Thematically rich and visually stunning, Stalker is the best film that's ever bored me. I saw it in a theater, forcing me to experience it all at once, but I still felt fairly unaffected by it. There's a haunting quality to it, certainly, but the pacing was far too slow to hold my interest. I think I'd rather read some good analysis of this than ever sit down and watch it again.

My grasp on the material here is just too weak to rate it any higher. Most of the philosophical discussions went completely over my head, and the long stretches without dialogue weren't quite entrancing enough to keep me invested.