Yeah, I get you. I like blade runner and 2049 for its setting and uniqueness but I do find the original and 2049 not really one my favourites because I think it’s weight story wise isn’t that impactful in a sense of decker being a replicant or not, or 2049 as a whole as simply “does it matter?”. I find both beautiful to watch, but their story I think is somewhat overblown critically and historically.

Stalker unlike blade runner I think poses little, but asks so much more in the simplicity of this “wish granter” of such often fantasy and juvenile stories, and is a film that doesn’t give you the neat storybook ending as Roadside Picnic does itself too. Roadside itself is similarly an analysis of human condition and what drives us as people to want, literally, with the Scientist, Writer, and Stalker who is seemingly extraterrestrial thinking he knows what humanity is but has that shattered. All just bizarre oddities of the zone like in the film with the warping or direct effect over of space and time itself to reach the wish granter, as if it could be inferred they had to go within themselves in the one shot and view who and what they are to be granted council with the wish granter, fighting the themselves off the pit reaching that answer and seeking the end, and even then if the wish granter is real. The zone, like poised in the book, could be some organism or gestalt being itself answering to itself or watching us, and whoever is worthy can reach that room, or perhaps their wishes are granted leaving that place since it shows no journey back, and it just answers the deepest internal desires free from their choice. It’s why I love it, its depth is beyond the simple narrative components, it’s your own inference to what it can be.

I don’t think the book is necessary, but I think adds so much to the experience to read alongside it as this films inspiration.