Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #662 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-04-22
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Colour, Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: Russian
• Subtitled in: Cantonese Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Russian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 155 minutes

DVD Description
DVD Special features:
Stills gallery
Cast and crew biographies and filmographies
Interviews with director of photography A. Knyazhinsky / production designer R. Safiullin
Extract from Tarkovsky's diploma film "The Steamroller and the Violin"

Russian language with subtitles in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Russian

Synopsis
With STALKER, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky returns to the mind-bending, philosophy-tinged science fiction of SOLARIS. The setting is an unnamed country in an unforeseen postapocalyptic future. A meteorite has landed, and its impact has created a mysterious phenomenon known as the Zone, within which resides a sinister room said to grant humanity's deepest desires. Only Stalkers are able to enter the Zone, bringing intrepid citizens to test their strength and desires against the Zone's enigmatic treacheries. The film follows one such Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) as he attempts to bring two characters known as Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and Scientist (Nikolai Grinko) into the Zone. The hapless trio makes a difficult and mud-drenched journey, dodging military guards and invisible traps and enduring extreme psychological strain. While Tarkovsky avoids any direct political reading of STALKER, the film's allegorical structure presents a powerful and disturbing metaphor for humanity's loss of and subsequent quest for faith. The Stalker's struggle to rescue himself and his family while guiding those more wretched than himself creates a physical and metaphysical drama that leaves the viewer breathless. Blending visual, narrative, and cinematic conventions to portray the fractured logic of the Zone, Tarkovsky conjures a universe of despair and desire in which science, rationalism, and technology must face off against love, humanism, and faith.

From the Back Cover
Deep within the Zone, a bleak and devastated forbidden landscape, lies a mysterious room with the power to grant the deepest wishes of those strong enough to make the hazardous journey there. Desperate to reach it, a scientist and a writer approach the Stalker, one of the few able to navigate the Zone's menacing terrain, and begin a dangerous trek into the unknown. Tarkovsky's second foray into science fiction after `Solaris' is a surreal and disturbing vision of the future. Hauntingly exploring man's dreams and desires, and the consequences of realising them, `Stalker', adapted from Arkady & Boris Sturgatsky's novel `Roadside Picnic', has been described as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time.

Customer Reviews

Best of Tarkovsky?
This is a truely great film. Set in an apocalyptic future, the 'stalker' leads a 'writer' and 'scientist' through the zone, towards a room, that has the power to grant their deepest wishes.

The plot isn't the primary focus of the film but more a canvas for the ponderings of the characters. Tarkovsky gives each scene the time it needs to settle in your mind.

Others have commented that the film is 'slow' and thefore hard to watch. I've seen other Tarkovsky films which, to me did feel like they took an eternity to finish. Maybe its because I knew what to expect from a Tarkovsky film, or maybe it was because 'Stalker' resonated with me more than the others, but I found it engaging from start to finish.

The colours and images are spectacular. And the end is one of the best i've ever seen, opening up interpretations about the whole film and making you question what the film means and what Tarkovsky is tring to convey.

On the cover there is a quote from a monthly film bulletin calling stalker the most impressive of Tarkovskys films. This for me is definitely the best of his. Although 'The Sacrifice' comes a close second.

one question
Brilliant film for all the reasons given by others, by why does the Amazon listing mention everyone except Tarkovsky?!

Too close for comfort
As a film, Stalker would have made a great short story. Two and a half hours of unrelenting misery to encapsulate a few pages of brilliant speculation on the nature of the spiritual quest.

"Life is suffering" as the Buddha said and in the Soviet Union the suffering was no doubt hard to ignore. Perhaps Tarkovsky really was trying to discover beauty in the belly of the wasteland but it was always a demolished factory, a filthy evil mess. The irony is that Tarkovsky may have died as a result of cancer contracted from the toxic chemicals on the film set, a fate he shared with two of his actors.

A further irony is that only in an oppressive elitist totalitarian state could such a grossly self indulgent project have been realised. It is unlikely many Soviet citizens would have been enriched or enlightened by this film.