Stalker (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

I recently got into the world of Soviet cinema when I watched the 1986 sci-fi bizarro comedy "Kin Dza Dza" on Amazon Instant Video. Shocked by what a good feature it was, I searched for more Soviet science fiction and came across two films by the same director that stood out: "Solaris" and this film, "Stalker." I was a little underwhelmed by Solaris, don't get me wrong I liked Solaris a lot, but it didn't match what I expected it to be in my head. "Stalker," on the other hand, went way above and beyond my expectations.As you probably know, Stalker is a film about a sort of guide, called a stalker, who guides people through a surreal landscape sectioned off by the government due to its unpredictability called "The Zone," which was supposedly the sight of an alien crash landing some thirty years prior in this film set some time in the indefinite future. The stalker's job is to navigate the Zone because of its ever-changing nature and lead his clients to a place called "The Room," which supposedly grants wishes, or rather, makes whatever someone's deepest desire, whatever wish that has caused them the most pain-- make that dream a reality. As a result of this, no one leaves the Zone or the Room the same. The stalker in this movie guides two men going by the aliases of the Professor and the Writer through the Zone and to the Room in what becomes over a series of heated debates between the men leading up to the climax a stunning meditation on the nature of belief.The movie was filmed in the old USSR, where religion was banned. I'm not the most religious person in the world, I'll be the first to admit that, but the stalker seems to be a man of some faith, and is ultimately dismayed at the results of what he says at the end of the film will be the last time he guides anyone through the Zone. He swears he'll never take anyone to the Room again based on the end of his latest adventure because the people he guided there lacked the necessary belief to have their wishes granted, or maybe even the basic belief to even want to have their wishes granted. It's a stunning conclusion, and I'm trying to write it out with as few spoilers as possible, here, but I've already said too much.The film is beautifully restored in a 2K restoration and it was apparently filmed in 4:3 ratio, which I found a little confusing at first, but that's the way it's supposed to look-- if you have a widescreen TV, the black bars on the sides of your screen are normal. I was actually a little taken aback by this at first considering that "Solaris" was filmed in 2:39:1 or at least 16:9 and filled all or most of my television screen. But back in the 1970s and 80s it was not unheard of to film a movie in the 4:3 ratio because that's the same ratio that old TVs were back then. A good example of this is "The Shining," which was filmed in 4:3 and cropped to a more theatrical ratio, which is precisely why I haven't bought "The Shining" on Blu-Ray because all the Blu-Ray versions of "The Shining" are cropped to a 16:9 format from the original 4:3, but in the case of "Stalker" the original aspect ratio is retained and restored in beautiful 2K.The special features didn't speak a whole lot, which is sad considering this is a Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, there were a few interesting interviews from 2002 with some of the people who worked on some of the more technical aspects of the film, but nothing with any of the actors which I assume is because many people involved with direct production of this film got sick from the heavy pollution surrounding the outdoor sets, some of whom even died, including the director. But there's also an interview Geoff Dyer, who's like a superfan of the movie and wrote an entire book about it, but nothing in particular that I found extremely enlightening. This was also the case with the Solaris Blu-Ray-- which I also found sad, aside from the great restoration done on the film itself. So this Blu-Ray is really more about the feature itself than the supplements which are usually the highlights of a Criterion Blu-Ray.All in all, this is a thinking man's movie. I wouldn't recommend it to the casual moviegoer because they're likely not to "get" it. If you liked "Solaris" chances are you'll like "Stalker" even more. It's soft sci-fi bordering on fantasy but sci-fi nonetheless. It was made in a world where all direct talk of gods or God was strictly forbidden and does a great job at getting around that by having several discourses on the nature of God, faith and belief or lack of belief. I watched this film back to back with "Solaris" and that makes for an excellent double feature and if you buy this Blu-Ray, you should probably also buy Solaris on Blu-Ray because as I said, they go well together. But to sum up this review, "Stalker" is a stunning meditation on the nature of belief and what it meant to be a believer in a world that had outlawed believing.

It'd been many years since I had seen Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's excellent science fiction film, and I watched it last night. For a science fiction movie, Stalker is certainly an oddity. Released in 1979, loosely based on the short novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and directed by Tarkovsky, the masterful Russian director who lived too short a life, it tells the tale of a part of Russia that has been visited by an odd event. It may have been a meteorite that fell, or it may have been an alien visitation. But the event created the Zone, a dangerous area which was cordoned off by the police, and where few could go.A Stalker - a sort of guide who takes people through the traps in the Zone - meets up with two men who want to visit the Room, a place where wishes come true. One is a Professor, a man of reason, and the other a writer, a man of inspiration. The Stalker is a man of belief. Very little happens in the movie, which lasts more than 2 1/2 hours, except for their trip to the Room, and their discovery of what they want from it.Stalker is science fiction only in its premise; there are no aliens, no magic, nothing that would be noticed as science fiction. It is a slow movie; very little happens, and some of the shots are several minutes long. It's a science fiction movie as it would have been written by Samuel Beckett. Yet it's a brilliant existential examination of the desires of men and women.At first, the film begins in sepia-toned black-and-white, but once the three characters reach the Zone, the film changes to color. Just as Oz was in color, so was the Zone. The Zone is located outside an industrialized city, and is full of the detritus of modernity. Yet Tarkovsky films these banal, cast-off items with the plastic beauty that he showed in all his films. Some of the shots are breathtakingly haunting, yet there is nothing special in them.In a prescient shot, near the end of the movie, the Stalker can be seen returning to his home with his wife and daughter, and, across the river, a nuclear power plant is seen. The Zone could be the area surrounding Chernobyl. There is no devastation, simply signs of nature taking over some human artefacts.According to an interview with the production designer, the film took two years to shoot. The first year's footage was lost, apparently because it was an experimental film stock that couldn't be developed. (Though that suggests that it was only sent for development after the entire film was shot, which seems at odds with the way movies were created at the time.) Tarkovsky then started over, reshooting the entire movie, over another year.The DVD is decently produced, though the English subtitles are a bit clunky. It contains the original mono soundtrack, and also a recent 5.1 mix, which, in my opinion, ruins the movie. It is merely the mono soundtrack with added environmental sounds, trying to create "atmosphere," yet Tarkovsky used a lot of silence in this film, and the surround mix is never quiet.I first saw Stalker in the early 1980s at a retrospective of movies by Wim Wenders in New York. Wenders had made a selection of films to be shown with his movies, and, preceding his Kings of the Road (In the Course of Time), was Stalker and John Ford's The Searchers. All three of these movies are quests, searches for people or ideas, and the very long program that day (more than 7 hours) was an extraordinary example of three different approaches to the quest movie. Since then, it has been one of my favorite films. It's an odd movie, more like a Beckett play than science fiction, yet it is unforgettable.If you've never seen Stalker, you should by all means watch it. It is a truly unforgettable movie by one of the great directors of the 20th century. His life and career were too short, but his films are all masterpieces.