Stalker

Stalker is an ambitious project, executed in perfection and still remains to be one of the best Sci-Fi films till this day. As an amateur cinephile, my journey of discovering film started from Netflix, where fragments of cinema are limited but trash entertainment lives rent free. I pondered upon Annihilation by total accident, though thrilled to witness Natalie Portman, I was not expecting it to be great. It turned out to be one of my fav Sci-Fi films, truly an underrated piece of art. Years later (which is today), I saw Stalker for the first time, and I didn’t just love it, I could feel myself encapsulated in The Zone.  100/100 I remember before playing it on my laptop, I had such a goliath of faith. I hoped that I would enjoy every tiny bit and detail of the film, wished that I could dig up a new masterpiece. As soon as the film commenced, my soul hung tight to me, gawking at the intricacies, the beauty of that crazy camerawork (like omfg), the extremely poetic and powerful dialogue, the enigmatic sense of mystery, I couldn’t get enough of any of that.  I don’t recall passing through a barrier that indicates the characters were already in The Zone, it was merely a stretched sequence of them on a railcar, with closeups throughout, crossing a landscape of the unknown as the clanking of the tracks gradually morphed into futuristic, high-pitched, atmospheric sounds. Before I could notice it, the greyish color grading splits into a world of color, where greens were scattered across, nature was alive. They were in The Zone. My faith was well worth it. I always thought from the beginning, that Stalker would be more symbolic. I was very wrong. I perceive the film to be heavily influenced on faith, which is something we all need to strive towards a greater source of meaning. The Zone could be a simple form of belief, where all lost is found. It provides the hopeless with solace and motivation, like a temple, a mortal-made image for other mortals to worship. Or it could also be an extraterrestrial area, an eccentric but solemn space, gifting unfathomable power to the chosen. In my solid opinion, I think it’s a combination of both. The elements of Sci-Fi and the strength of faith coalescing in harmony, defining The Zone, it’s not something we can fully understand but rather a totem that can impact and change the lives of many. There’s also another interpretation of mine: > the city outside The Zone looks more like the actual zone due to the severe pollution and it’s dull, gloomy and lifeless land of bleak> in The Zone, it’s an obvious contrast of the barren  landscape outside of it, it’s more blissful and serene inside the area thus I believe that Government Intervention was done to hide something (could be anything though) Stalker is like a film Christopher Nolan would tell you to not try to apprehend it, but try to feel it, experience it in its purest form. Thanks to Tarkovsky for his otherworldly, ahead-of-its-time masterpiece.