Benedito Dias Rodrigues I've been waiting a long time to see this so famous picture,even a silent movie that isn't my favorite kind,this movie is just communist propaganda unfortunately....has some impressive part as when they see the ghosts in the vessel's mast prior they'll be(not)shooting...the fantastic scene when the leader was shot and felt in the ropes...and the finally the great sequence of stairs of Odessa with strong suspense and horror....but the movie is about raising,revolution of the people...it's really happened in Russia and become a super state as URSS and this political system dropped many decades before.... that's a message...why the communist didn't works.... to me the answers is simply...the men aren't mentally ready for such human endeavor to reach at the point...so Sergei Eisenstein was involved by Reds leadership to put this on screen...apart from that the movie is good piece for study of cinema only.....masterpiece from this time is Metropolis!!!

DonAlberto After watching Battleship Potemkin I realized straight away I'd made a great purchase. Its reputation as a masterpiece, one that must be pass down from one generation to another is well deserved. People singing its praises are always banging on the idea of this mute film conveying a wide set of emotions that even the best talkies can't even dream of. Now I understand why. Not having a voice to use, actors must draw on their bodies and faces in order to make the viewers sad, happy or whatever emotions or feelings they want them, us to feel. And I promise you, this film is a roller-coaster as emotions are concerned. The story centers around the events that took place during the Russian Revolution and the central role the Battleship Potemkin played in it. I wouldn't like to get carried away and say that the historical facts aren't important to the narrative because the make up its core, but my recommendation is to shift one's focus from the story to the characters. I'm sure you won't regret it.

Prismark10 I only became aware of Battleship Potemkin when Brian De Palma's The Untouchable's was released for the cinema and critics mentioned the pram down the steps sequence and how the director borrowed it from this film.This Russian silent celebrates the Potemkin uprising of 1905 which Lenin regarded as an event that sowed the seeds of the The Russian Revolution. This is a fictionalised retelling by Sergei Eisenstein.The crew of the battleship are mutinous because of poor rations, meat infested with maggots but the officers pass it as fit for consumption. The crew will not back down so the officers throw tarpaulin over some of the rebellious crew, give them the last rites and are ordered to be shot.One of the crew members Vakulinchuk pleads to the firing squad not to fire and the firing squad does not and it leads to mutiny as the officers are overcome.The uprising in the ship travels far and wide and in the town of Odessa, Vakulinchuk who was killed in the mutiny, his body is displayed to the public. In the Odessa steps a gathering crowd are fired on by Tsarist troops where women and children are killed leading to a pram with a baby plummeting down the steps. The massacre never happened, it was made up for the film.The film is propaganda to symbolize the spirit of the Russian revolution. Sergei Eisenstein made an epic film with vast crowd sequences, montage editing techniques and is a technical accomplishment for the early days of cinema.

joshuafagan-64214 In all respects that matter, this film hasn't aged a day.Sure, the story is hamfisted, but so what? It's basically a propaganda movie. I'm not watching it for depth of character. That's not the reason it has endured. Sure, it's almost dreadfully short, but so what? Films can show a lot in 69 minutes if they don't dawdle, and this film doesn't even think about dawdling.Through and through, it feels like a 20's movie, but it feels like how you want 20's movies to feel, how 20's movies have been portrayed as feeling by our nostalgia for that time as well as the Hollywood Machine itself. Most twenties movies, while charming, lack cinematic sophistication. The actors can be funny or poignant, but the effects are lacking and the camera work looks like it was done by someone who had never been to film school. Many end up feeling like half-finished films. It's hard to embrace films from that era, even films that I want to like and are interesting, such as Nosferatu or the original King Kong, because of this. I can appreciate them, but appreciation does not translate perfectly into affection.This film is different. I wouldn't go so far as to call it the best film I've ever seen, as some film critics have, but it is definitely a awe-inspiring accomplishment. It's not only astonishingly good, it's astonishingly good in a dynamic, electrifying way. The title cards don't just exist to provide information- they punctuate the story beats. Each scene flows into the next. Each part flows into the next. There are montages and elaborate wide shots and quick, clever cuts. It's better on a technical scale than most films released today.Nothing is done without a purpose though. Every shot and trick furthers some thought or feeling. It's both lean and remarkably ambitious. It does not run for three hours, but it tries and mostly succeeds to capture the emotions of the audience. Eisenstein knew what he was doing; he had to. Many of the creative technical work was his invention. When Hollywood filmmakers saw this film, they were shocked. They had never seen anything like it before.This deserves a place among the films that changed absolutely everything. Just like there is a pre-Citizen Kane era and a post-Citizen Kane era, there is a pre-Potemkin era and a post-Potemkin era. Every film buff has their favorite Potemkin shot. Mine is the long shot on the steps where the woman holding her injured son is shot by the Cossacks.Back in the day, even people who didn't know exactly what made this movie special couldn't stop thinking about it. Fundamentally, it is different from every film that was made beforehand. Even now, I can hardly think of a film that's made me care so much about a scenario I would have otherwise cared so little about.I've repeatedly said that even as an outsider from the 21st century, it's possible to tell an innovator from a copier. Even if you didn't know anything about Star Wars, it's easy to differentiate it from the works that copied off it. The original carries itself with a poise, an energy that the copiers just don't have. It's in the 'blood' of the film, if you will. This film has that. I can see myself rewatching it over and over again. It's one of the most gripping motion pictures of the 20th century.