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 In a forbidden region called the Zone, there is a room where "the center of
power and evil confronts" those who enter it. The Stalker leads a scientist
and a writer into the Zone in search of this room in an effort have their
greatest desires fulfilled. "Stunning visuals hauntingly recall the
post-apocalyptic landscape of Bladerunner and create a science-fiction voyage of the most menacing kind." 1979, 163 minutes, VHS
"Haunting" seems to be the word used by many to describe this movie by Russian
maestro Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) and I would have to join into that camp whole-heartedly. After sitting
through all 163 minutes of this uppity, boring, claptrap, I was indeed haunted
by the $16.99 price tag that was on the movie prior to opening it. I have no
idea how much that would be in rubles, but I'm guessing that somewhere the
Rooskies are using my cash to buy some bathtub vodka on the black market and
hoisting a few to another capitalistic pig that they've just suckered. Bravo
boys! You got me! I'm a strong enough American to admit when I have been had.
Most folks though refuse to say anything resembling the truth about this
movie, other than grudgingly noting that it may just be a tad overlong and I
know I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but the first thing your
movie needs to do is entertain me. If you want to make a thoughtful rumination
on your navel or whatever, I am all for that and if you want to explore what it
means to exist and whether anything really matters other than fretting over
deep philosophical issues of the day, then I say go to town and make the great
"art" film, but Jesus, don't send me into a catatonic state in doing so! I sat
through all of this thing in one day and it felt much longer than the twice as
long Captain America serial (which in itself was a bit of marathon urine bath) I watched just the
day before. I kept waiting and finally began pleading with this movie to have
something, anything happen so that I could say something nice about it, since I
liked Andrei Rublev and figured that somewhere along the way, Tarkovsky would
have something of interest to say about the human condition or the Russian way
of life, but all I got was three dirty guys wandering around a dirty landscape,
periodically babbling on and on about matters like Truth, the meaning of Art,
and whether some guy should double back and retrieve his knapsack (he
shouldn't, but he did anyway). There could have been some nuggets of
illumination scattered amongst all this blarney, but not nearly enough to try
and trawl for.  I remember after watching Andrei Rublev, a film about a mute Russian priest
painting icons in the dark ages and persevering in the face of pure hopelessness
(what a sap), feeling like I gained some insight on the importance of certain
big topics, though it's been so long since I saw it, I can't remember what
exactly it was that I was awakened to. I was hoping for something similar
here, but as soon as things started, I was punching myself in the head to stay
awake. If the opening credits in your movie put me to sleep, the other 160
minutes are probably going to have to pick up some of the slack. In this film
Tarkovsky seems to be in love with the single, long range camera shot that
pulls back real slow sometimes. I found myself wondering what was going on in
the middle of the scene that felt like I was sitting in the upper deck of a
stadium. I could see there were some people and they might have been
doing something (but more often than not, they weren't) and I thought that
wouldn't it be neat if we could actually see these characters and the
expressions on their faces, but I'm assuming that that was Andrei giving us
that whole "we all lead a faceless existence" stuff that undergrads and crappy
rock and roll singers always try to parlay into term papers and hit records.
In Andrei's defense, there were scenes that weren't like that though. I recall
(quite painfully as it turns out) the time when our three protagonists are
riding a gas-powered rail hand car into the Zone (or ZONE as the subtitles
irritatingly put it) and Andrei gives us a close-up of one guy's head for
something like five minutes. What was really awful was that he was almost
shaved bald, but managed to have this icky light patch of stubble on his head
that made you wonder if he was suffering from some type of partial albinoism.
We also get these shots of our guys laying down a lot. In fact, the main guy,
Stalker (more on the names later) seemed to just lay down where ever he felt
like it. We saw him walk around in the weeds and lay down for no reason. We
saw him lay down for a nap in the middle of a stream on some rocks. The movie
even began and ended with this guy laying in bed! This guy didn't seem to be
stalking anything more serious than a nap.  So what exactly is interfering with Stalker's repeated attempts to catch a
little shuteye? Well, somewhere in Russia (not surprisingly near the
Chernobyl
nuclear plant that makes a cameo appearance at the beginning and ending of the
film) something has landed in the nearby woods and caused some strange things
to occur. I was never quite sure what strange things occurred other than me
wasting seventeen bucks on such a flimsy premise, but the Russians eventually
surrounded the area with troops and try to kill anyone who attempts to enter
the place, called the Zone. There was probably some deep meaning related to
the government's attempts to keep their citizens from checking out something no
one knows anything about, but since I live in America where our government lets
us do whatever we want and never even tries to interfere in our lives or our
personal decisions (unless they run counter to their sexist, outdated, and
hypocritical right-wing agenda) I didn't know what was going on. This military
opposition to anyone entering the Zone did provide the movie with its only
action as our boys got shot at a couple of times when they were going into the
Zone. All you artsy-fartsy fans out there shouldn't cower though, because the
action is brief and that would be the last bit of action for the next two
hours, until you shake the cobwebs off yourself, get off your couch and finally
hit the eject button like it was the g-spot or something. So who is going into
the Zone and why? Well, this is one of those important flicks where people don't have regular names. I don't mean that these guys
had street names like Snoop or Dubya or something like that. I mean their
names are they're profession and vice versa. So you have Stalker (a Stalker is
a guy who guides people into the Zone), Writer, and Physicist. We're defined
by our calling in life, you see. Well, neither did I, but I guess they have
pretty strong Vodka over there, so we'll give them some leeway.  We don't know all that much about any of these characters and none of them
really endear themselves to you, but here's what little we do know. The writer
is a boozehound who is sick of writing or doesn't see the point of it or is
worried that he has nothing left to say or wonders if he'll be remembered when
he's gone or whether that spec script for an outer-space update of The Brothers Karamazov is going to be optioned or something. The physicist isn't much of
anything except somehow he locates a bomb left in the Zone by his buddies back
at the lab (what a bunch of pranksters) and decides to blow up the Zone, but
then doesn't. He also argues with Writer about crap losers in coffee shops are
always arguing about. Real Americans everywhere are too busy making money,
being successful and watching sports to worry about stupid stuff like whether
someone's worth is determined by whether any of there work is remembered after
they die (the short answer on that is "yes"). We learn the most about Stalker.
He's an ex-con who got all hurt in prison (I'm betting closed head injury, but
that's just an educated guess based on his penchant for lying down all the
time), has a wife, and a mutant kid without legs. I'll admit that I woke with
a start when I heard the word "mutant" and that a legless freak was going to be
involved in all this somehow, but this movie is all about just being a metaphor
even when it comes to their deformed twerps. It turns out that she has legs,
it's just that she can't walk. We do learn at the end of the movie that she
has mental powers, but big whup. So she can move some glasses around a table.
I was looking forward to seeing some kid with stumps or flippers or something.
And all you're giving me is Uri Geller parlor tricks? Most of the movie involves Stalker leading the other two in the Zone in an
effort to reach The Room, a place where everyone's biggest desire comes true.
Lots of deep meanings are dropped on us during all this, such as not being able
to get to The Room via the most direct route. Also, the path to The Room is
different every time. And although Stalker divines the path, the person who
wants to go into The Room must lead the way. There's much blah-blah about what
would happen if everyone had access to The Room and whether Stalker is only in
it for the feeling of power he has in the Zone. He says he just wants to help
people be happy and cries a lot when Writer gets on his case about his true
motivations. Since I don't cotton to no man crying about nothing except his
college football team losing their bowl game (but only when the old lady's
wedding ring was on the line), I gots to assume that his head injury was acting
up again when he was bawling. I think everyone decided not to enter The Room
for some reason, because the next thing I know, we're back in the bar where
this all started and everyone is back from the Zone safe and sound. Stalker
and Mrs. Stalker have an important conversation about hope, belief, grief,
happiness and lots of other mushy stuff real men never talk about (do I even
have to tell you that Stalker is on another crying jag during all this?). This
affair was even more of a bloated disappointment than my cousin Pookie.
Whatever message Tarkovsky is trying to lay on us is lost in its muddled
delivery, static film making, and the poorly realized characters, notably
Writer and Physicist, that have to deliver his important ga-ga to us. I'm all
about hoity-toity movies about guys wandering around a wasteland that is merely
a reflection of their own vapid souls and think that this Stalker guy had some
potential to really connect with the audience (whenever the movie gave the guy
a chance, he was able to really show some believable intensity), but Tarkovsky
is intent in distancing us from the characters, probably because he doesn't
want them to rise above the level of simple abstractions meant to signify
whatever deep view they puke up. The result unfortunately is that the viewer
never gets engaged on any level and is left wondering what all the fuss is
about. The movie's best scenes involved Stalker, his wife, and kid and their
interactions, but the other 159 minutes left my soul as tortured as those of
all the characters in this gargantuan example of the lumbering foreign film
that rightly gets ridiculed by the masses.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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