Stalker (1979)
★★★ — Stalker (1979)
Stalker is Andrei Tarkovsky's sixth feature, loosely adapted from the 1972 science-fiction novella Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who also wrote the screenplay through several heavily revised drafts. The production at Mosfilm was famously troubled: early footage was ruined due to faulty film stock, forcing a near-complete reshoot, and location work took place at an abandoned hydroelectric plant in Estonia, where cast and crew were repeatedly exposed to toxic chemical waste (Tarkovsky himself, along with several colleagues, later died of cancers possibly linked to the shoot). Made during the long stagnation of the Brezhnev era, the film sits alongside Mirror and Solaris as part of Tarkovsky's Soviet-period trilogy of deeply personal, philosophically ambitious work before his eventual self-imposed exile to the West in the early 1980s.
A-Z World Movie Tour Russia It's 2.5 hours long but the last 30 seconds is the most interesting part. I know Stalker is supposed to be one of the greatest films ever made. It's 55th on Letterboxd, top 30 on the BFI list, 100% on Rotten Tomatoes but honestly, I just couldn’t connect with it the way I expected. Don’t get me wrong, the cinematography is stunning. That sepia-to-color shift as they enter the Zone is visual poetry. Every frame feels deliberate, heavy with meaning, like you’re wading through a dream that doesn’t want to be understood. Tarkovsky’s atmosphere is unmatched. But the film drags. At two and a half hours, it feels like it’s testing your patience as much as your intellect. Long silences, slow walks, philosophical monologues about desire and despair, fine in theory, but after a while, it starts to feel more like homework than cinema. The story, such as it is, moves at a crawl, and while I appreciate the ambiguity, I also left feeling like not much had actually happened. I get that it’s about the journey, not the destination, but when the journey is this slow, you need more emotional or narrative payoff. My personal take... I think the Stalker might not even be human, maybe an alien or entity frustrated by how messy and confused humanity is, always chasing meaning but never knowing what we truly want. The ending, with his daughter using telekinesis on the glasses, hints at something beyond human, like evolution, or divine disappointment. That idea intrigued me more than the film itself. It’s beautifully made, no doubt, but overlong and emotionally distant.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1979 | Watched: 2025-08-28
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