Stalker
When thinking about the bigger picture, this film succeeds. There aren’t a lot of films which can address the meaning of life without making me cringe, but this film prevails in some ways . The theme is very fitting, as the meaning of life is mystery, just like the rest of the film.
Stalker sets a very mysterious mood which drives home the stories themes. This film relies a lot on cinematography and for the audience to think deeper and come up with their own interpretations on what the film addressed.
However, I rate Stalker a 4 in this review because even though it has amazing direction, the actual story isn’t engaging in my opinion and the pacing is too slow for the story. I’m fine if a film is slow paced for a logical reason — like in 2001: A Space Odyssey — but I didn’t see any logical reasoning for its slow pace other than to allow the audience to think and analyze about the film and to show that when coming up with an answer to “what is the meaning of life” deserves a long well-though out answer and that you should rush to conclusions. Also, the characters weren’t appealing to me and their dialogue was mostly based on magnifying the themes or just giving us exposition (I’m fine with the exposition but repeatedly talking directly about a film’s themes is when the dialogue starts to become less captivating). However, this is part of Tarkovsky’s style (based on my watches of Solaris and Stalker); Tarkovsky’s style isn’t my favorite. However, you can’t deny this his craft is one of a kind and that he is an exceptional director.
However, when I mean Stalker is slow, I mean it. I fell asleep 5 times and had to restart 5 times just to watch it. By the end, I was partly begging for it to end already. It was better than Solaris, but not by much