Stalker

🔥 2nd Watch | Top 100 | Tarkovsky Ranked There are three pillars of the human soul: reason, sentiment, and faith. All share a common purpose. Yet, they remain in complete dissonance. This is what Stalker is all about. It's an exploration of our inner mechanisms. It's an exploration of humanity. It pains me that I once I discarded Stalker as a slow, pretentious, and worthless film that was too obsessed with its own self-importance. Fatigue is a powerful drug not to be taken lightly. If fatigue can ruin The Godfather and Stalker, it can impact anything. But fortunately, there exists a simple remedy: a mid-day viewing. And as one might guess, this remedy was extraordinarily effective, turning an overrated film into one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life. Stalker's cinematography is transcendent, with its visual prowess only rivaled by Kubrick's visionary 2001: A Space Odyssey. In some cases, it even exceeds the beauty of Kubrick's revolutionary creation. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stalker's cinematography is gravitating, with its mesmeric quality glueing my eyes to the film and never giving me any moment to look away. Tarkovsky paints this ill world in a harsh overwhelming orange. The usage of the orange color palette, instead of a traditional grey, to represent the world's suffering is a strange but significant detail. Not only does it develop a rich visual atmosphere, but it steers away from hopeless and empty associations that a grey color palette has. Despite the world's illness, there is still faith to be found somewhere within all the madness, as exhibited by the colorful innocence which paints Monkey's scenes. However, the Zone is also portrayed with a spectrum of colors rather than the monotonous orange which dominated the first forty minutes of the film. The colors of the Zone are multifaceted, evoking a complex array of emotions, including melancholy, beauty, peace, destruction, awe, mystery, horror, and more. The Zone is truly a complex place, in similar vein the Bowman's alien enclosure in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the colors exhibit this detail seamlessly. But interestingly, near the halfway marker, brief shots in the Stalker's perspective revert back to the sharp orange seen in the first act of the film. But the color palette represents only a shard of the cinematography's greatness. The crawling dolly shots create a sense of magic and uneasiness, similar to what the characters experience in the Zone. And along with masterfully created sets which evoke similar complex moods along with perfectly blocked actors within those sets, all of these elements work in perfect harmony to create one otherworldly visual experience. Since I adore 2001: A Space Odyssey, it might be clear why I adore Stalker so much. However, before I continue boasting Stalker's merits, I do want to point out one gripe with Stalker, something that Kubrick's space epic avoids. Andrei Tarkovsky is more than just a filmmaker; he's also a philosopher. However, Tarkovsky implants a lot of his philosophy in the characters' dialogues. Therefore, despite all of the show-don't-tell imagery that Tarkovsky employs with cinematography, at times it feels like the film tells us exactly how to feel through the use of dialogue instead of allowing the characters' actions to speak for themselves. This is why 2001: A Space Odyssey is my favorite movie of all time. 2001 does open up these discussions with the dialogue, such as the interview scene where it invites the possibility that the HAL 9000 computer could possibly have true human tendencies. However, no answers are strictly given; it only proposes the question. Despite this, this is one minor flaw in an otherwise perfect movie. Like the rest of the movie, Stalker's soundtrack is magical. Every aspect about feels alien. The melodies, instruments. It all feels like it originates from a fever dream. Yet in all its strangeness, it evokes all of the same emotions that the rest of the film does. The music truly harmonizes flawlessly with the Zone. And of course, each actor delivers a phenomenal performance. Their traits, their desires, all sharply defined. The dynamic between the characters is strong not just because of the amazing blueprint gifted by the screenplay, but also the amazing execution on the actors' ends, as well as the extraordinary directorial talent of Andrei Tarkovsky. As I mentioned earlier, Andrei Tarkovsky is as much a filmmaker as he is a philosopher. And I can't imagine any film in Tarkovsky's filmography showcasing this attribute more than in his magnum opus Stalker. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stalker is pure cinematic poetry, and it has rightfully earned its place as one of the greatest artworks of all time. "When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win." ⬅️ Previous Review: Mr. & Mrs. Smith