The required lament I’m supposed to give after watching this is that they don’t make SciFi like this anymore. There are no effects and nothing to do with outer space. The movie is more of a philosophic meditation than anything else. It’s three guys in ruins and desolate fields talking about mind games for well over 2.5 hours. In one respect, I do agree with the required lament. It was nice to see such a simple SciFi movie. Despite it just being three guys talking cryptically, the movie chugs along at a good pace. I was often surprised at how much time had passed already. I enjoyed watching this more than I expected. I definitely want to check out more of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films now.
On the other hand, I’m not clamoring for a lot more movies like this. Any movie I watch has earned 90 minutes just for existing. I have patience for anything under 2 hours. Above that, I need to start seeing some justification. It doesn’t need to be a great justification. I’m fine if it’s just that there are a lot of action scenes and they need to justify a reason to string them together. It can be that there are so many good jokes that they don’t want to cut out. I’m even fine with a movie taking its time to build familiarity for a climax that can then hit harder. I just can’t deal with time wasting. Stalker just doesn’t have enough going on to justify why it was so long. Not all those conversations were vital. Many of those points could’ve been made simpler with just as much effectiveness. While I liked Stalker, I’m not rooting for anyone to imitate its formula. It’s hard to pull it off and Stalker only barely does.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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