Of course, the government has set up cordons around the Zone, and entry is strictly prohibited. There, the laws of Nature don’t apply, time and space thwarted by the hidden desires and wills of all those who enter it. ![]() Based very loosely on Roadside Picnic, a novel by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay), Stalker imagines a dystopic future not far from our present-or Tarkovsky’s present, before the fall of the Berlin Wall or the devastation of Chernobyl-in which some sort of otherworldly force has deposited a place humans have called “the Zone” onto Earth. What that means is of course nebulous for a viewer not steeped in the director’s life or in the history of the country that was both home and hostile to him and his work throughout most of his life. In Tarkovsky’s last Soviet film, the director seems to be admitting that what he’s feared most has come to pass. But now the future’s a part of the present.” So says the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, somewhere deep in the Zone, contemplating the deeper trenches of his subconscious, of his fears and life and whatever “filth” exists within him. All its changes loomed somewhere beyond the horizon. “Once, the future was only a continuation of the present. Stalker Year: 1979 Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee Rating: NR Runtime: 140 minutes That the end of Kubrick’s odyssey returns us to the beginning only reaffirms that purpose: We are, and have always been, the navigators of our destiny. So much more than a speculative document about the human race colonizing the Solar System, 2001 asks why we do what we do-why, against so many oppositional forces, seen and otherwise, do we push outward, past the fringes of all that we know, all that we ever need to know? Amidst long shots of bodies sifting through space, of vessels and cosmonauts floating silently through the unknown, Kubrick finds grace-aided, of course, by an epic classical soundtrack we today can’t extricate from Kubrick’s indelible images-and in grace he finds purpose: If we can transcend our terrestrial roots with curiosity and fearlessness, then we should. And yet, despite its ambitious leaps and barely comprehensible scope, every lofty symbolic gesture Kubrick matches with a moment of intimate humanity: the sadness of a mighty intellect’s death the shock of cold-blooded murder the minutiae and boredom of keeping our bodies functioning on a daily basis the struggle and awe of encountering something we can’t explain the unspoken need to survive, never questioned because it will never be answered. Clarke (whose novel, conceived alongside the screenplay, saw release not long after the film’s premiere), 2001: A Space Odyssey begins with the origins of the human race and ends with the dawn of whatever comes after us-spinning above our planet, god-like, a seemingly all-knowing, hopefully benevolent fifth-dimensional space fetus-spanning countless light years and millennia between. ![]() 2001: A Space Odyssey Year: 1968 Director: Stanley Kubrick Stars: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain, William Sylvester Rating: G Runtime: 139 minutesįifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick told the story of everything-of life, of the universe, of pain and loss and the way reality and time changes as we, these insignificant voyagers, sail through it all, attempting to change it all, unsure if we’ve changed anything. You may also want to consult the following, sci-fi centric lists:ġ. In fact, of all the major streamers, HBO Max likely has the library most focused on what you’d call older “classics,” rather than newer releases-fine with us, considering that segment tends to be less well represented. There are alien classics here, and sentient robots, and plenty of action and horror crossovers as well. That makes for an interesting sci-fi library indeed, one that balances total schlock with acclaimed works by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. ![]() Rather, almost everything here received a wide release at some point. That’s because unlike the catalog of Netflix, Hulu or (especially) Amazon Prime, the bulk of the selections here aren’t made up of modern, straight-to-VOD, zero-budget productions with vague, one-word titles. ![]() The overall scope of the service might not be quite as broad as something like Netflix, but you’re likely to have heard of far more of these films. The first thing one notices, looking at the sci-fi genre as it exists on HBO Max, is that there’s an unusual level of genuine curation involved here.
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