STALKER Movie Review

A meteorite crashing to Earth has created a desolate wasteland area known as the Zone. The Zone is forbidden to anyone except special guides known as Stalkers. Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's epic metaphysical fantasy focuses on three Stalkers who enter the Zone, searching for “the room,” a spot at the Zone's center that supposedly has the power to reveal and materialize the deepest of human fantasies. Working with themes similar to his science-fiction epic Solaris, Tarkovsky here creates a disorienting and powerfully hypnotic visual experience that makes great demands on the patience of viewers, but provides sights and sounds vastly different from virtually any film you've ever seen. What it all adds up to is up to you; in a sense, the film itself provides the same opportunity for the projection of our own fantasies as does “the room” at the Zone's center.

NEXT STOP … Solaris, Nostalghia, La Jetée

1979 160m/C RU Alexander Kaidanovsky, Nikolai Grinko, Anatoli Solonitzin, Alice Freindlikh; D: Andrei Tarkovsky; M: Eduard Artemyev. VHS FXL, FCT