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Stalker
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Final Verdict: [Just... Bad]
Stalker
Drama / Russian / 1979
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I don't remember, it's been on my watchlist for forever. I just looked it up and it says it's a psychological thriller with sci-fi elements, that'll probably do it.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
2 hours of my life gone for nothing.
From the very start of the movie you can tell this movie's going to be slow and it is. The only positive thing I can say is that it has a few interesting shots... but those shots drag their ass back and forth across the screen before anything happens.
It takes a while before you can glean any concrete info from the world, but eventually we learn that Mr. "Stalker", living in a black-and-white dank industrial hellscape, abandons his wife and child to escort two others into some place called "The Zone".
The movie, being divided into two parts, doesn't even tell you why this is happening until the second part. The first hour is comprised of the three sneaking past some non-specific institutional security (graduating from the Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship) to pass a gate, jump on a minecart, and roll out of town.
The "Zone" is identified by the movie shifting to color and it's characterized as being an unoccupied forested area in the middle of nowhere that's "dangerous", so much so that the characters throw metal nuts with cloth tied through like the boots in Cube.
Stalker is called "Stalker" apparently because that identifies him as one of the sort of people that escort people into the Zone. He's SUPER panicky about the danger of the Zone, but his clients are reasonably skeptical because there is NOTHING to substantiate his claims about it.
One of them eventually gets fed up and decides to walk off on his own, but is terrified by a scary wind sound and decides to follow Stalker.
End of Part 1. That is a basic summary of 1 hour of bull****tery. The camera loves to be either too far away from the characters to distinguish them or to superglue itself to the back of the character's skulls precisely when we should be getting wide shots of the environment. The characters themselves either have nothing to say or have some navel-gazey nonsense to wax poetic about.
One dude randomly says he's morally torn between believing the world should be vegetarian and his personal craving for meat. Sure, yeah, okay, that's potentially relatable and important... nothing comes of it though.
Part 2 finally drops in some overdue backstory to say that the group are searching for "The Room", which is supposedly a place in "The Zone" capable of granting wishes. The Zone was created by a crashed meteorite, and the wish-granting rumors were enough to persuade the government to block the area off.
Stalker insists that The Zone is ever-changing, but he immediately contradicts this and contradicts this repeatedly by naming multiple locations in the Zone he's been to consistently. He describes traps and says detours are safer than direct paths, but the characters NEVER encounter ANY danger AT ALL, there's even a hallway that the movie dwells on trying to convince us and the characters that it's supposed to be scary, Stalker even hides behind one of his clients, calling out to usher the one guy he coaxed into drawing a long straw into going down it alone...
...and only after they all pass it without any issues whatsoever does he go "THAT WAS THE 'MEAT MINCER'". WOW, damn, the "Meat Mincer" was sure scary. That Hallway with literally nothing in it in which literally nothing happened was definitely terrifying.
The ****ty part is the movie isn't even edited in a way to be scary, it's just the characters insisting that what's happening is intimidating.
They even encounter a black dog, one of the only living things we see in The Zone. The image of a black dog gets so much mileage in just one of the Harry Potter movies as a dark omen or sign of imminent death, but the characters virtually don't even acknowledge it's existence.
There is zero supernatural phenomenon throughout the first 99% of the movie, that you have no reason to believe any of this crap by the time they get to The Room. And when they get there, one of the clients changes his mind and questions Stalker who has never entered The Room himself, and the other guys just whips out a ****ing BOMB. "Yeah, it's just 20 kilotons." This dude's been walking around the movie this whole time with a nuke in his pocket and the reveal is so underwhelming. Apparently he reasons that if The Room can grant wishes that eventually a bad guy will get his wish granted, and that probably explains this plague, or that war, or any number of bad things that have already happened, so he wants to blow it up.
But then over the course of a few minutes they reason that everything they've heard so far is 100% hearsay anyway, and Stalker admits he's never even seen a happy person come out of The Room, even though that's ostensibly the purpose of bringing people here, cause he wants to make people happy. "Before you enter you have to believe." Oh, yeah that's real persuasive, definitely not some self-reinforcing bull**** going on there.
SO THEY JUST LEAVE. And the movie still takes an eternity to end!
Eventually the movie ends on a shot of his daughter who supposedly lost her legs to The Zone by some arcane means, even though we see she has legs and just uses crutches, she's revealed to be using some kind if telekinesis on a couple glasses.
And that's the movie. WHY did I need to watch that?
What does her having magic powers add to the rest of the story? That what was said about The Room was true? Did they ever even mention his daughter having anything to do with The Zone besides? The Room, let alone? We never even SEE The Room beyond a painfully dragged out scene in which we watch rain come and go over the flooded floor just inside the entryway. Literally what value did that add to the story or my viewing experience?
AT LEAST there was some kind of pay off and it doesn't just leave the entire story ambiguous, but it's just a worthless payoff, unexciting and adding virtually nothing to the rest of the story.
You just dragged your ass across my face for 2 hours and then told me that you MIGHT have deigned to plant a shiny nickel on my forehead with your buttcheeks. But I'm feelin' up there and I'm not finding it!
The only possible explanation I can think of for this movie is that it's a religious analog. One-off characters near the beginning of the movie are complaining about the cultural absence of God and then our protagonists get strung along for a familiar pilgrimage to a magical site said to grace them with their heart's desire, even though there's no evidence that it's real and the character's literally say that they have to give up empiricism for what they're doing. You have BELIEVE for it to work, but if you already BELIEVE then it's already worked.
This would be a fine narrative agenda, but the movie does **** ALL to even keep that one-time dialog fresh in my mind or consistently relevant to the random bull**** these characters spout over the course of the journey.
Bottom line, this movie is boring as sin and it doesn't suddenly become enjoyable or fascinating or engrossing to watch a camera pan for 7 ******* minutes by granting that that was the central conceit of the movie. If that is the point this whole movie could have been done WAY better than it was. It could have been shorter, punchier, more meangingful, actually emotional (and not just the characters insisting on the emotions I should feel), and a 20-kiloton bomb in somebody's pocket in the third act could actually not be a complete joke of a plot device.
Very close to giving this an Irredeemably Awful rating, but for mostly boring me to death I give it...
From the very start of the movie you can tell this movie's going to be slow and it is. The only positive thing I can say is that it has a few interesting shots... but those shots drag their ass back and forth across the screen before anything happens.
It takes a while before you can glean any concrete info from the world, but eventually we learn that Mr. "Stalker", living in a black-and-white dank industrial hellscape, abandons his wife and child to escort two others into some place called "The Zone".
The movie, being divided into two parts, doesn't even tell you why this is happening until the second part. The first hour is comprised of the three sneaking past some non-specific institutional security (graduating from the Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship) to pass a gate, jump on a minecart, and roll out of town.
The "Zone" is identified by the movie shifting to color and it's characterized as being an unoccupied forested area in the middle of nowhere that's "dangerous", so much so that the characters throw metal nuts with cloth tied through like the boots in Cube.
Stalker is called "Stalker" apparently because that identifies him as one of the sort of people that escort people into the Zone. He's SUPER panicky about the danger of the Zone, but his clients are reasonably skeptical because there is NOTHING to substantiate his claims about it.
One of them eventually gets fed up and decides to walk off on his own, but is terrified by a scary wind sound and decides to follow Stalker.
End of Part 1. That is a basic summary of 1 hour of bull****tery. The camera loves to be either too far away from the characters to distinguish them or to superglue itself to the back of the character's skulls precisely when we should be getting wide shots of the environment. The characters themselves either have nothing to say or have some navel-gazey nonsense to wax poetic about.
One dude randomly says he's morally torn between believing the world should be vegetarian and his personal craving for meat. Sure, yeah, okay, that's potentially relatable and important... nothing comes of it though.
Part 2 finally drops in some overdue backstory to say that the group are searching for "The Room", which is supposedly a place in "The Zone" capable of granting wishes. The Zone was created by a crashed meteorite, and the wish-granting rumors were enough to persuade the government to block the area off.
Stalker insists that The Zone is ever-changing, but he immediately contradicts this and contradicts this repeatedly by naming multiple locations in the Zone he's been to consistently. He describes traps and says detours are safer than direct paths, but the characters NEVER encounter ANY danger AT ALL, there's even a hallway that the movie dwells on trying to convince us and the characters that it's supposed to be scary, Stalker even hides behind one of his clients, calling out to usher the one guy he coaxed into drawing a long straw into going down it alone...
...and only after they all pass it without any issues whatsoever does he go "THAT WAS THE 'MEAT MINCER'". WOW, damn, the "Meat Mincer" was sure scary. That Hallway with literally nothing in it in which literally nothing happened was definitely terrifying.
The ****ty part is the movie isn't even edited in a way to be scary, it's just the characters insisting that what's happening is intimidating.
They even encounter a black dog, one of the only living things we see in The Zone. The image of a black dog gets so much mileage in just one of the Harry Potter movies as a dark omen or sign of imminent death, but the characters virtually don't even acknowledge it's existence.
There is zero supernatural phenomenon throughout the first 99% of the movie, that you have no reason to believe any of this crap by the time they get to The Room. And when they get there, one of the clients changes his mind and questions Stalker who has never entered The Room himself, and the other guys just whips out a ****ing BOMB. "Yeah, it's just 20 kilotons." This dude's been walking around the movie this whole time with a nuke in his pocket and the reveal is so underwhelming. Apparently he reasons that if The Room can grant wishes that eventually a bad guy will get his wish granted, and that probably explains this plague, or that war, or any number of bad things that have already happened, so he wants to blow it up.
But then over the course of a few minutes they reason that everything they've heard so far is 100% hearsay anyway, and Stalker admits he's never even seen a happy person come out of The Room, even though that's ostensibly the purpose of bringing people here, cause he wants to make people happy. "Before you enter you have to believe." Oh, yeah that's real persuasive, definitely not some self-reinforcing bull**** going on there.
SO THEY JUST LEAVE. And the movie still takes an eternity to end!
Eventually the movie ends on a shot of his daughter who supposedly lost her legs to The Zone by some arcane means, even though we see she has legs and just uses crutches, she's revealed to be using some kind if telekinesis on a couple glasses.
And that's the movie. WHY did I need to watch that?
What does her having magic powers add to the rest of the story? That what was said about The Room was true? Did they ever even mention his daughter having anything to do with The Zone besides? The Room, let alone? We never even SEE The Room beyond a painfully dragged out scene in which we watch rain come and go over the flooded floor just inside the entryway. Literally what value did that add to the story or my viewing experience?
AT LEAST there was some kind of pay off and it doesn't just leave the entire story ambiguous, but it's just a worthless payoff, unexciting and adding virtually nothing to the rest of the story.
You just dragged your ass across my face for 2 hours and then told me that you MIGHT have deigned to plant a shiny nickel on my forehead with your buttcheeks. But I'm feelin' up there and I'm not finding it!
The only possible explanation I can think of for this movie is that it's a religious analog. One-off characters near the beginning of the movie are complaining about the cultural absence of God and then our protagonists get strung along for a familiar pilgrimage to a magical site said to grace them with their heart's desire, even though there's no evidence that it's real and the character's literally say that they have to give up empiricism for what they're doing. You have BELIEVE for it to work, but if you already BELIEVE then it's already worked.
This would be a fine narrative agenda, but the movie does **** ALL to even keep that one-time dialog fresh in my mind or consistently relevant to the random bull**** these characters spout over the course of the journey.
Bottom line, this movie is boring as sin and it doesn't suddenly become enjoyable or fascinating or engrossing to watch a camera pan for 7 ******* minutes by granting that that was the central conceit of the movie. If that is the point this whole movie could have been done WAY better than it was. It could have been shorter, punchier, more meangingful, actually emotional (and not just the characters insisting on the emotions I should feel), and a 20-kiloton bomb in somebody's pocket in the third act could actually not be a complete joke of a plot device.
Very close to giving this an Irredeemably Awful rating, but for mostly boring me to death I give it...