Your favorite Science Fiction shows, movies...Drama, comedy, sone w with some horror element...

[JoseBalow]

96. It's not about what you probably are thinking it is

It's not about stalking, the crime... But it definitely is creepy, and philosophically pretty deep, in a way only Tarkovsky can deliver.

The film tells the story of an expedition led by a figure known as the "Stalker" (Alexander Kaidanovsky), who guides his two clients—a melancholic writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a professor (Nikolai Grinko)—through a hazardous wasteland to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the "Zone", where there supposedly exists a room which grants a person's innermost desires. The film combines elements of science fiction and fantasy with dramatic, philosophical, and psychological themes.

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A man works as a "Stalker", leading people through the "Zone", an area where the normal laws of physics do not apply, and remnants of seemingly extraterrestrial activity lie undisturbed among its ruins. At the heart of the Zone lies a "Room," which is said to grant the wishes of anyone who steps inside. The Zone contains ominous, supernatural hazards. The government bans anyone from entering the Zone and subjects Stalkers to long prison sentences if caught.

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Writer Lilya Kaganovsky says the film's mysterious Zone drawn comparisons with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that was established in 1986 (seven years after the release of the film) in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, and some of the people employed to take care of the Chernobyl power plant referred to themselves as "stalkers". Though the film does not specify the origin of the Zone, near the end, in a shot of the Stalker with his family outside the Zone, what appears to be a power plant is visible in the background. The themes of nuclear radiation and environmental degradation would be revisited by Tarkovsky in his final film, The Sacrifice.

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Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the use of rapid montage. The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes. Almost all of the scenes not set in the Zone are in sepia or a similar high-contrast brown monochrome, with the exception of scenes featuring Stalker's daughter, shot in colour.

Wiki

It's really quite an excellent and extraordinary film, though admittedly probably not the sort of thing many American audiences would likely appreciate.

(2:41:55)