Stalker is a 1979 film beautifully shot and lit to perfection by Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film tells the story of three men that desire to change their lives, they also are willing to risk their lives to change them.
Side Note: Stalker in this film is not the creepy man following women around in the middle of the night. Here a Stalker is a professional guide into the Zone.
The sepia look of the film lasted until the three men of the film, the Stalker, the Professor and the Writer broke through the Zone border and just evaded detection before the Gulag-type guards fired upon them. They escaped because the guards wouldn't dare follow them into The Zone. THE ZONE
In the near future a meteor, or some object, hit the earth creating a phenomena the government and the people ended up calling the Zone. This place eventually become restricted to the public. Many people traveled into the Zone never to return, so many years later it has become isolated. The Zone is said to be a product of a Super Civilization.
Because of its isolation and mystery it has become mythologized among the people. They believe if you enter it and navigate your way to a place called the Room, you will have all your desires met.
The trio of men travel along in a little train car, just big enough to barely fit the three of them. Their faces coast along as the camera stays with them, long enough for us to hear the clunk of the steel wheels almost turn hypnotically musical while they roll along the tracks. They then stop where color fills the landscape and we now know, they are in the Zone.
Stalker asks many questions about who we are, who do we think we are, who are we actually? We have uncovered mostly everything, now we live in a world with no telepathy, no ghosts, no fly saucers. They not only don't exist, they can't exist in this modern world. There is no Bermuda Triangle, what there is, are laws, laws that restrict and focus us to the will of the Owners of this world. In the Middle Ages life was a bit more interesting because every house has its goblin and every church had God. Today, with most rocks uncovered, it's left most people... bored, bored with life, bored with death, bored with other people and ultimately bored with themselves. Are we searching for meaning in a meaningless world?
If everyone admires an antique until it is proven to be a fake, what really changes? The so-called antique doesn't change at all. What we found beautiful shouldn't change but yet it has all changed because we changed it. We create our reality.......How am I to know I don't want what I want or that I really don't want what I don't want? How do I discern the difference of what I want or don't want when I want to be healthy and in shape but I also want to eat cake and candy? I don't want to be over weight and out of shape but I also don't want to eat vegetables late at night when I'm watching TV.
I love that Stalker resists interpretation, at points you can see a prophetic allegorical film with themes that would echo Chernobyl seven years later. Stalker points out that we live in a world of laws that are unbreakable to the point of an omnipresent incarceration. The film is a bizarre journey into the unknown, it's about not quite appreciating what we already have in our own lives, and that these three men are willing to give all that up to get to the Zone.
The Buddha, like the Stalker, was willing to give up his wife and child in order to go on a one way pilgrimage in search of enlightenment, never to return, never to allow himself to go backwards.
The Zone is a maze of death traps where former traps disappear and new ones appear. The Zone is a place that you construct based on the state of your mind. It doesn't reward the good and punish the bad. It's the unhappy that it seeks.What if we could know it all, would it matter? In a subjective reality where the reality of facts and truth are solely based on what attention you pay them, what would it matter to know or not know?
The film challenges us to reassess our own beliefs and convictions, it reminds us that despite living in a predominately secular time that Bronze Age religious mythology and the idea of God looms over most of us. The film wants us to believe, not because it's all real but because it might be necessary. The Stalker is a believer and is naive and idealistic about his beliefs, he requires the faith of others to fuel and justify his own faith. When his two companions, Writer and Professor decide not to go in the room and make their wish, this infuriates Stalker. He wants to believe in the ontological existence of God and when they don't go into the room this further confirms to him that faith and the belief in a higher power is becoming extinct.
Can we live in a world without faith? Can we live in a world where people no longer believe in anything? Where do we go in a world that is no longer made up of myths and superstitions? Since the dawn of civilization we have never known such a place. There have been secular peaks and valleys along the way but never has the world experienced such a non-religious time that we live in today. 
We create our own fear. The real point of going to the Zone and entering the room is the realization that you never needed it in the first place. There are no quick fixes in this life, no matter how much faith you believe you possess.
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