A professor and a writer walk into a bar...
When a movie’s opening credits include “Poems by,” you know you’re in for something different. The success of and made it clear audiences are crying out for sci-fi with more on its mind than how cool spaceships are, but there’s “Spaceships are cool..
. but is giving Timothée Chalamet power bad?” and then there are lethargic meditations on the fundamental nature of human existence. That may explain why Hollywood hasn’t yet tried to reboot a movie where seeing trees rustle counts as an action scene, despite its premise inviting endless reinterpretation.
Andrei Tarkovsky is not a household name, but his fingerprints are all over . was remade , while directors ranging from Lars von Trier to Jonathan Nolan have cited him as . The Soviet era filmmaker was famously but also best known for making it.
And his second (and last) sci-fi film released on May 25, 1979, is routinely cited as both an all-time great and a production so troubled it may have taken the lives of some of its creators. A very loose adaptation of the 1972 novel the movie stars Alexander Kaidanovsky as a guide (called a stalker) who leads an aloof professor (Nikolai Grinko) and cynical writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) into the Zone, an abandoned landscape on the fringes of an anonymous city where the laws of physics have stopped playing fair. Purportedly the product of a meteorite, anyone who survives the Zone’s deadly traps can reach the Room, which is said t.
