Roadside Picnic & Stalker, Deadpool's Anti-Plot, and Story Break: UNESCO's Agent

Tarkovsky took a philosophical Russian sci-fi novel about alien artifacts, made the authors rewrite the script repeatedly to strip out the science fiction, and produced a three-hour film about three men walking through mud — and it's considered one of the greatest films ever made. We cover both Roadside Picnic (the 1972 Strugatsky brothers novel) and Stalker (the 1979 Tarkovsky film), why they work as completely different versions of the same source material, and what Russian fiction understands about human existence that Western storytelling mostly avoids. Also: a Deadpool & Wolverine follow-up now that the dust has settled at $1.3 billion — specifically, what it means that character work and tonal execution carried a film with almost no plot. And in Story Break: UNESCO's Agent, a thriller concept about a secret operative whose only mission is protecting World Heritage Sites that no government will defend — half James Bond, half Grey Man, with a character who loves humanity's heritage precisely because he's given up on humanity itself.