[mikorym]

I think that a lot of the "understanding" part of these kind of films are quirks to do with constraints that the filmmakers had. I would contrast this with Annihilation, which was confusing because it's not properly thought out IMO and with Inception, which was not confusing but did sacrifice artistic expression for mainstream appeal (for example the scenes with a lot of gun fighting).

The immediate things about Stalker that bothered me are, in retrospect, solvable with a higher budget or better film support. Of course, some people prefer the authentic aura of such films. Bellflower would be another example of a good idea and story done on a budget of next to nothing.

[krrrh]

> I think that a lot of the "understanding" part of these kind of films are quirks to do with constraints that the filmmakers had.

This reminded me of one of my favourite (possibly apocryphal) tidbits about Solaris. People have differing theories about the significance of the very long highway scene, and Tarkovsky had an elaborate explanation for it when the film came out. [1] [2]

At some point he admitted that he and his camera operator mostly really wanted to visit Japan, so he included a suitably long scene to justify visas and a travel budget. I don’t recall where I read that, but it helped me to be comfortable taking my own meaning from a work of art and not worrying too much about discovering the author’s absolute intent.

[1] https://www.quora.com/In-Tarkovsky-s-film-Solaris-what-is-th...

[2] https://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/old/content/real-world-metropoli...

[mikorym]

I still need to watch the original Solaris!

It's funny how random things like that can obfuscate your impressions in so many things in life. I feel like this about a lot of computer science and mathematics: If you are not the author of a text, then your focus is easily distracted by peculiarities that have little to do with the core message.

I guess this would partly also be why a lot of high school students struggle with calculus. By the way, on that topic, if you consider dx and dy to be variables, then calculus's strange notation is easier to try to make sense of.

[ptsneves]

I liked much more anihalation than inception in retrospective. There are many more questions in anihalation than in inception,where it can boil down to "is this real? ". Anihalation goes into how do I want to be part of the world, do I care if I live, or how important is that "me" is really "me". These stuff allows for very good existential questioning in the good way.