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Rating:  - A very good film, though not a great one....
I do love Tarkovsky (as many who know me will attest), and I do like The Sacrifice very, very much. It has some astounding, memorable sequences in it. It has evocative use of Ebarme Dich, Mein Gott from Bach's St. Matthew Passion (one of Tarkovsky's favorite composers and one of his favorite musicial pieces), excellent performances (even more remarkable when you take into account he shot the film in Swedish, not his native tongue), and beautiful cinematography (by the late Sven Nykist, Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer for many years). However, I can't help but feel that there's something missing, something incomplete about it. I want to say it's an undisputed masterpiece, but I cannot honestly say that. Even though I believe the film is meant to be ambiguous, sometimes it's just confusing. Perhaps this is because the original script was simply about Alexander going off with Maria, giving up everything he had for her, to live a simple life. This script was called The Witch, and was written in 1981. Then Tarkovsky incorporated other things (like nuclear war), and the film became something else, though not necessarily better. The confusion leaves me with a feeling of "almost a masterpiece".
There are many great shots in this film, such as the 9 1/2 minute opening take (Tarkovsky's longest shot), the scene when the nuclear bombs fly overhead, the scene where Alexander prays, the opening credits scene, and the legendary house burning scene near the end of the film. It is not the last scene of the film, as some critics have said, and it's not the longest take Tarkovsky ever shot. It runs 6 1/2 minutes, and it was eclipsed by the opening shot, which is the longest take Tarkovsky ever shot. In the house burning scene, it seems comical at times, all the running in and out, but it's still amazing to behold, at least techinically. The first time they shot this, the camera jammed and the house continued to burn. There was only one camera on tracks, and the camera failed. Tarkovsky was devastated. But the crew somehow managed to rebuild the house in two weeks, and the scene was reshot, this time with TWO cameras on tracks, running parallel to each other.
There is a wonderful documentary shot by the editor of The Sacrifice entitled Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It's one of many documentaries about Tarkovsky, but it's the only one where he was actually present during the shooting (discounting Voyage in Time, a TV film he did for Italian TV which he co-wrote and co-directed with Tonio Guerra, the great Italian screenwriter), and it's fascinating to watch. It's nice that Kino included this on the DVD, because their transfer of The Sacrifice is way too bright, so the inclusion of the documentary makes up for the poor transfer. Many of the scenes were supposed to be shot in the dark, so to speak. The DVD is still worth buying, but the transfer is not correct at all.
Overall, a great film, but not Andrei's best. The Sacrifice is not an awful film, it's not even close, but it's disappointing when compared to Tarkovsky's magnificent track record previous to this film.
Rating:  - A TRANSCENDENT HYPNOTIC MASTEREPIECE
In decades of movie going and collecting, only a few films keep coming to mind at unexpected moments. For me, this is what great art does; that is, it becomes a part of one's experience and not just a momentary diversion.
THE SACRIFICE is such a film. It touches on the most fundamental questions of being a human in our post-modern world. And it does it with extraordinary grace and a sublime, haunting, beauty. For me, it is a transcendent and hypnotic masterpiece. What cinema aspires to but seldom achieves.
To miss the point of this film, as some reviewers have, or to call it sophomoric, as others do, is to admit one's own inability to consider that life itself may hold a greater meaning and that we are more than an accidental fluke in a cold, uncaring universe.
This film dares to use its considerable art to challenge us like a zen koan and a prayer. It is a meditation on what it means to be fully human and mortal and moral. It asks us to wonder at the unknown and it weeps that we are prisoners of our humanity -- and that we hold the fate of our planet in our hands.
All this sounds kind of pretentious, I know, but this magnificent yet simple film works on a higher level than most movies. It's not easily categorized. But on a big screen, I was mesmerized by the extraordinary cinematography and equally transported by the subtle ideas. It was a profound and provoactive movie going experience that I didn't expect and one that has remained vivid as the years pass.
Rating: - The Demiurge Spake
To all of those captious parties whistling in the dark: damnant quod non intellegunt
Rating: - Are you tough enough?
I read a number of the reviews on this film and felt the need to respond to the dismissive ones.
Tarkovsky's films - for me The Sacrifice and Andrei Rublev are his crowning achievements (with Ivan's Childhood as the shortest and most accessible of his great films)- these films should be recognised as some of the most important works within any medium of art in the last century.
So, if you want to watch a film to escape, to entertain, to work as background music to re-runs of your own psychic heritage, it is NOT advisable to get this one out one tired evening.
Watching Tarko is hard work - principally aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and creative work for the individual viewer. All great art transforms our relationship with the world, and I would argue that this sort of transformation is never crucially an intellectual change. We may be confronted with ideas through Art but it is their broader resonance within our whole humanity that is the key to Art's power and importance.
I have seen The Sacrifice five times over the last 15 or so years. At the beginning of the film there is the question "what is your relationship with god?"
The film for me is the most personal, honest and often uncomfortable (nightmarish?) contemporary meditation on this single question. [For those fellow T-freaks out there the Director himself fronts up to this theme within the "Making of The Sacrifice" documentary - it is especially poignant in the knowledge of his approaching early death soon after the release of this film].
All I can say to viewers out there that think that Tarko is just another foreign film-maker dealing in dark, overly-intellectual and pretentious symbolic imagery for mass consumption by arts students, well... I dare you to be completely open to the film.
p.s. forget looking for the beginning, middle and end - that western over-obsession with narrative - the line of thought that tells the audience when to cry, clap or stand-up at the "end." Yes, forget for once a focus on events - instead, look, listen, taste, touch and smell that thing the English language calls Art.
Are you tough enough?
Rating: - The healthy pain of the nostalgia !
The word and the silence. The last opus of Tarkovsky . In Sacrifice , argument and form , technique and style are joined so perfectly that challenge all kind of viewers. Its intimate fascination is quiet and in contrast with the easy cinema , superficial so fashion , demands a contemplative attitude , to be understood justly .
The first shots with the dying tree symbolizes the painful spiritual state of the contemporanean civilization . Tarkovsky applies in this moment what you might be call the little stage of the world , with characters who are at the same time real and symbolic . Adelaide is an unsatisfied woman married in a convenience marriage . Victor is the disenchant scientist with clear echoes of Stalker -1979- (the previous film to Nostalgia) and Martha , the blossom girl lost in her own narcissism.
When the atomic attack occurs , Tarkovsky sets his characters in the edge of the knife . Hysteria and terror oppose to desperation . Alexander breaks his inner barriers and he is opened to the trascendence . These are two times of biblical references .
Finally you have to keep your word and the holocaust will come . Bitter metaphor : Tarkovsky seems to revel us there is no place for the trascendentalism in the present world.
But the last sequence is loaded with a deep sense of redemption . The child recovers the language and stood in front of the dying tree he begins to irrigate it with the inquiring statement : In the ancient times the verb was , and with the Bach music ( Mattheus Passion ) the camera climbs the tree and links with Leonard painting , the true icon od adoration and offering .
Tarkovsky is back in this way to his goal and the method of all his artistic and religious cosmovision.
Andrei Tarkovsky ( born April 4 1932) this superb and talented filmmaker, died In Paris ( December 29 1986 ) and the film was dedicated to his son Aliosha.
This film won the posthumous Ecumenic Prize in Cannes .
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