Just because a movie is shot artfully and scenes are drawn out way longer than necessary, doesn't make it good. I liked the sepia/color switch at first, but by the end the back and forth just became distracting. Because there were so many looong scenes of people walking slowly (supposedly to increase the suspense, but I lost my patience for this strategy long ago), it allowed me to start nitpicking a few things.
The sound effects are absolutely terrible and do not match what is happening on scene (why are his footsteps so echo-ey when he's out in the open???), and the vocals seem to be dubbed as the lips don't match exactly. I also often could not tell who was speaking. The makeup effect Tarkovsky seems to like where the skin around the hero's eyes gets increasingly dried out as the movie goes on, which seems to be aimed at underlining his exhaustion, makes no sense here as the atmosphere is quite moist and he even had a nap in the middle! These are things I wouldn't notice if my attention was captured, but since so many scenes dragged on, they started to annoy me more and more.
The point of the movie seems to be that men should learn to be happy with what they have, which is fine, but women are specifically excluded from the thesis, as he refuses to take women to the room where desires are grants for some unstated reason. The glimpses at the end of the stalker's wife and daughter were actually the most interesting scenes and made me wish they were used more in the bulk of the movie. It also would have been more interesting if there was more dialogue and less monologue. The monologues ended up sounding disconnected and self-indulgent to me, since there were so many.
For a movie where literally, nothing happens, the length was not earned, in my opinion. If it had been cut by an hour, I would probably have given it 5 or 6 stars for cinematography and decent acting. As it is, I cannot recommend it.
The sound effects are absolutely terrible and do not match what is happening on scene (why are his footsteps so echo-ey when he's out in the open???), and the vocals seem to be dubbed as the lips don't match exactly. I also often could not tell who was speaking. The makeup effect Tarkovsky seems to like where the skin around the hero's eyes gets increasingly dried out as the movie goes on, which seems to be aimed at underlining his exhaustion, makes no sense here as the atmosphere is quite moist and he even had a nap in the middle! These are things I wouldn't notice if my attention was captured, but since so many scenes dragged on, they started to annoy me more and more.
The point of the movie seems to be that men should learn to be happy with what they have, which is fine, but women are specifically excluded from the thesis, as he refuses to take women to the room where desires are grants for some unstated reason. The glimpses at the end of the stalker's wife and daughter were actually the most interesting scenes and made me wish they were used more in the bulk of the movie. It also would have been more interesting if there was more dialogue and less monologue. The monologues ended up sounding disconnected and self-indulgent to me, since there were so many.
For a movie where literally, nothing happens, the length was not earned, in my opinion. If it had been cut by an hour, I would probably have given it 5 or 6 stars for cinematography and decent acting. As it is, I cannot recommend it.