Stalker (1979): Co-written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky: [Cast and Crew]: The great Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's follow-up to his elliptical Solaris (the original, not the Clooney debacle) is the even-more elliptical Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic, a novel I haven't read by Soviet science-fiction legends the Strugatsky Brothers. It's also a clear influence on Jeff Vandermeer's recent Southern Reach Trilogy, adapted by Alex Garland as Annihilation. Except Stalker actually is a philosophical puzzle.
It's also one of the slowest movies ever made. Strap in and feel the lack of gees! Three Soviet men venture into The Zone, a mysterious area created by a mysterious something that may or may not be from outer space. Only a Stalker can navigate the shifting, dangerous landscape of the Zone to reach the center, where a person's wishes can be granted by yet another mysterious something.
The movie consists primarily of the three men trekking through forest land littered with industrial garbage, rotting houses and warehouses and factories, tunnels, and many other seemingly mundane things. They all talk a lot about life, the universe, and everything. There are many startling visuals created by Tarkovsky's skill at making the mundane seem peculiar and even numinous.
By the end, one is left with a science-fiction movie about mysteries and Mystery itself. It's certainly not for everyone, but I found its cumulative effect to be haunting, lingering long after the final, mysterious scene that seems like a prelude to some sort of crazy, languorous Soviet X-Men movie. Highly recommended.
Annihilation: Book One of the Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer: Interesting, cosmically horrifying ideas are relentlessly stripped of all horror and weirdness by the attenuated, flat nature of both characterization and description in this first, shortest novel of Jeff VanderMeer's double-named Area X/Southern Reach trilogy.
VanderMeer seems to be striving for the sort of vague horror of his Weird Fiction touchstone M. John Harrison, specifically in the vein of Harrison stories that include "The New Rays" and "Egnaro." Which is to say, the two Harrison stories included by VanderMeer in his massive and massively flawed anthology The Weird. Harrison's stories take place in places that seem contemporary, but vaguely so, with both time and place being disturbingly off-kilter.
So some time in the near future in the Southern United States, a research team of five women ventures into an area called Area X. They're the 13th such team. Or are they? Is this the near future or is this going on 'now'? Do the characters have names or are they only referred to by their occupations?
Our Biologist narrator lost her husband to Area X. Just getting into Area X somehow wipes one's memory of getting into Area X. The whole place is a sort of mutated dimensional space caused by Something from Outside crashing into a lighthouse some time in the past. Or that's what it appears to be. To the lighthouse, then!
Ciphers squabble with other ciphers. No one figures much out. There's a weird thing in an underground complex. There are signs of bloody battle at the lighthouse. The narrator's husband nicknamed her Ghost Bird, a nickname that doesn't seem to apply much to our characterless main character.
VanderMeer throws around italicized words and phrases like August Derleth editing H.P. Lovecraft stories. Is that intentional? Because the set-up of Area X is pretty much the set-up of Lovecraft's 1928 classic "The Colour Out of Space," in which the titular something mutates and destroys a New England landscape and everything in it.
It takes a special sort of genius to make events and things as weird as are posited in this novel so boring, so enervating to this reader that there is no way I'm reading the second and third books. Your results may vary. It all feels like horror for people too refined for horror. Not recommended.
