Stalker (1979).
IMDb runtime of 2 hours and 42 minutes, rated 8.1 by 132,000 members of the human comedy.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Enough!
The write up on the IMDb was interesting but the execution exceeds even the Hollywood gold standard for self-indulgent, incomprehensible nonsense. The intriguing premise is ground into the mud by the repetitive and aimless direction.
What is that premise? That there exists a place where dreams come true. Getting there is risky, staying there is impossible, but… of such stuff as dreams are made, just follow the yellow brick road. Instead of dragons, sea monsters, raging seas, precipitous cliffs, or wicked witches, those who venture into The Zone must get past heavily armed guards (wearing white biker helmets), barbed wire, land mines, and trek through mud and more mud. (There is a lot of mud in this movie.) Once in the Zone, there is The Room where dreams come true … maybe.
The protagonist is a guide who, for a fee, will lead a few people into the Zone and find the Room, through the traps for the unwary. He is addicted to the challenge but seems to have no dream of his own to realise. He is contracted by a scientist and a novelist to shepherd them to the Room. The scientist dreams of recognition for this work; the novelist wants to restart his career. That is the quest.
They start and after that it is a sepia dreary ruined world. The mud, the ruins seen now prefigure Chernobyl. The visuals are powerful but pointless. Every shot of the mud is attenuated far past the breaking even point. Then repeated. And again. Each repeat is held for nearly 90 seconds. (Yes, I clocked some.) And then repeated. One camera set-up yields 3 – 4 minutes of mud each time, and too often more. That’s entertainment – not!
This goes on for nearly three hours, and I confess I did not endure it all. Why should one? None of the three central characters engage a viewer. There is no structure once the quest starts. They could be going around in circles for all the audience knows. We never quite get what motivates the guide, but there is nothing else in his life but the Zone. He has sacrificed his family to this neurosis, it seems. He needs help, preferably off camera.
Why is it forbidden to enter? Unknown. Why do trains pass through it? Unknown.
Who cares? Not me.
After much stumbling about in the aforementioned mud, they come to the Room, but none of them dares enter it. Oh, 2+ hours for that balk. So they sit in the mud and deliver long, boring monologues to each other. If that is the payoff, go to a pub.
At an IMDb rating of 8.1, there are viewers who think it is the greatest movie ever made. There are many tributes on You Tube and the Internet Movie Data Base. Read ‘em and weep for our kind. Serge Eisenstein’s two parts of Ivan the Terrible taken together run but 8 minutes longer than this turkey, and each is far superior in every way.
While the core idea was intriguing it is far from original, and while the staging is effective the whole is less than the sum of those nearly three hours. Much less. As a 20-minute film on DUST it would have been a winner. Franz Kafka did this sort of thing in short stories with far greater effect because they punch.
And yes, I got all the religious imagery that was as subtle as a sledge hammer.
Having watched Ivan in his two parts, the AI Mechanical Turk on You Tube threw up this film, and I was intrigued by the description. Silly me.