Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1971 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-04-22
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• 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

Haunting
Stretching to two DVDs, 'Stalker' is a 155-minute film that feels even longer. Full of meaningful silences, existential discourses and lingering shots of landscapes and faces, this is not a film for action fans. Unlike that other great sci-fi film of 1979, 'Alien', there are no special effects of any kind and I suspect that most people will find 'Stalker' boring.

I must confess that my attention wandered at times, as the three main characters made such painfully slow progress towards their goal. However, after watching 'Stalker' I couldn't get it out of my mind and ended up having to see the whole thing again. Why? I think that 'Stalker', like many great works of art, takes time to reveal its secrets.

If Dostoevsky had been born a century later, I could imagine him making a film like 'Stalker'. This is not a sci-fi film, it's about the Russian soul and is as rewarding and frustrating as Dostoevsky's novels.

However, it is ultimately the cinematography which is the most powerful aspect of the film. The damp, lush, verdant landscape of the zone and the monochrome industrial dystopia of the town are some of the most haunting images I have ever seen.

If you prefer questions to answers, I recommend 'Stalker' without reservation.

Lingers in the Mind - Unforgettable
As already mentioned, this film is slow-paced and lacks amazing special effects, but give it your full attention and you will be rewarded by a technically brilliant shot film that cuts deep into the human psyche in a manner few hollywood films have ever managed to do. Images from the film linger on in the mind and stay with you for a life time. Shot using what must have been a very low budget, the film manages successfully to create an incredibly strange, alien/haunting sci-fi environment. It is very well acted and profound in ways I can't even begin to describe.On the other hand my wife thought it was boring, hated reading the sub-titles and didn't think there was a great deal of plot complaining that nothing really happens in the film and gave up half way through, citing Stalker as another of my 'weird choice of films'.If only I could get her to persevere I'm sure she'd see why I like the film so much...but alas. The funny thing is, I can easily identify and see where she is coming from but for me I found the film one of the most haunting, sub-concious penetrating, unforgettable films I have ever seen. Sorry to sound pretentious but this film is worth seeing and truly memorable - and whether in the end you like the film or not the film's tone and images will stay with you forever.

'The Greatest Science Fiction Film of All Time'
Tarvkovsky's second venture into SF (the first being his 1972 adaptation of Stanislav Lem's Solaris) has been described as 'the greatest sf movie of all time', yet this is as about as far removed from what we normally think of as SF as possible, as it ushers in Tarkovsky's late period, (an awesome tryptich that also includes Nostalgia and The Sacrifice), whose films are given over to more philosophical, unviersal themes, perhaps, than his earlier work.

In a grimy future world, a writer and a scientist are led into the Zone, an mysterious area sealed off by the authorities, by the stalker of the title. They have heard that the Zone contains a room where wishes can come true. Over the course of their journey, the three men bicker incessantly, each revealing their reasons for wanting to enter the Wishing Room (one of the film's working titles had been The Wish Machine).

The film, like all of Tarkovsky, is slow (nearly three hours), but the climax at the room is one of his greatest achievements, and the stalker's wife's speech is almost manifesto-like in its admission that without sadness life would be worse, because 'then there would be no happiness either.' This is Tarkovsky meditating on faith and miracles, and their seeming absence from the modern world.

Shot over two years in extremely difficult circumstances (the lab ruined the footage and the entire film had to be reshot, during which Tarkovsky had a heart attack; he became ill again during post-production and thought he was going to die), Stalker was first shown in the West at Cannes in 1980, where one critic commented that, with Stalker, Tarkovsky was 'throwing down the gauntlet' to other filmmakers. It remains one of the most staggering achievements in cinema.