We came to the Ultimate Picture Palace to see Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker through the sort of soaking wet, freezing cold night where the air is thick with damp that seems to wind its way in among your clothes, defying gravity. We found a surprisingly large number of people queueing in the rain. Students and film buffs, one guy just behind me
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The game's set in Chernobyl, isn't it? I was creeped out at first by the fact that the film seemed to anticipate Chernobyl, but Wikipedia told me that there were several deserted, environmentally devastated places in Russia already. It also told me that quite a few of the film crew died of horrible diseases due to them filming near a toxic chemical plant. Brrr.
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And yeah, there were old industrial buildings that were deserted and falling to pieces all over Siberia, for the same reason I imagine.
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I don't ever want to read the book, though. In case it's not exactly like the film and spoils it for me.
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I read the book first by some years, and found that the film then spoiled that for me :-( but it hadn't been a very big deal to me in the first place, so sounds like you potentially have more to lose than I did!
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I'm wary of actually ever re-watching it, for fear that my memories of it will be dispelled. I know that Tarkovsky has a predilection for sententiousness, as was never more clear in Solaris (which to my mind is a disappointing film and one of T's weakest). But Stalker seemed just right to me. His last film, The Sacrifice, is another film with similar protean mystical-religious themes allied to a grandeur of imagery (though again some of the ( ... )
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I did my best with Solaris a few years ago, but it turned into an endurance test. I think I actually fell asleep at some point. I brought some strong dark chocolate to Stalker expecting to need to wake myself up with little caffeine bombs, but no, it was a joy.
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I remember the Ultimate Picture Palace with great fondness, though it was still the PPP for a little while even in my day. O golden age!
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