I'll add a negative voice

Rating: 4/10 (21 August 2010)

In some ways, Battleship Potemkin was probably pretty impressive in 1925. I can understand why it is a milestone in the history of film and why film students study it and all. The camera work and montage editing is pretty impressive. There is a lot of epic spectacle captured on film. And I will even grant that some of the scenes work pretty well. For these reasons, I gave the film the four stars that I gave it.
But for me, the negatives still significantly outweigh the positives. On the whole I did not enjoy the film, and I even found some of its technical aspects very poorly done, even for the day.
The big problem here is that what we have is a propaganda piece. As such, the film is ridiculously heavy-handed and obvious, to the point of bathos. The evil officers and soldiers are so over the top that they lack credibility. We're supposed to feel this great sympathy for the downtrodden sailors and workers, but I felt precious little, mainly because I was so aware and irritated at the overt and clumsy way I was being manipulated. And let's get real here: these men are serving on a major *warship*, which means they potentially face a life of war and death and destruction and pain and suffering... having to eat soup made of bad meat should be the worst hardship they ever have to endure! The nadir, when I was supposed to feel the most empathy and I actually felt the least, was when the guy's corpse was on display, with the sign about him having been killed for a plate of soup. Puh-lease. He was killed for inciting a mutiny.
While we're discussing overbearing, heavy-handed propagandizing, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the priest. Now let's set some personal context here: I am a devout atheist, I despise religion in all forms, and certainly have no love for Christianity. Yet even *I* was offended by the crude characterization of the ship's priest, as some kind of wild-haired, wild-eyed hermit type, by crackey! When a Nazi propaganda film depicts a Jew in an over-the-top slandering caricature, we're all properly offended; so why is it suddenly OK when a soviet propaganda film does the same thing to a priest?
But propaganda here isn't the only problem. There is also the problem of pace. By modern standards, this is a short film; the version I saw was only 74 minutes. Yet it felt like an eternity, because in many scenes the pacing was just leaden. For instance, the scene where all of Odessa comes out to mourn the death of the sailor (and I wholly agree with another commenter here about how preposterous it is that these giant throngs of people are weeping tears, consumed with grief, over this one dead sailor that not one of them knew or had ever heard of; again, we reach the stage of bathos), this scene seems to run for a decade.
And the nadir of bad pacing: the scene preliminary to the mutiny, when the captain is ordering up punishment. The scene is so slow it actually induces physical pain. It's so slow that it actually becomes surreal. We have to sit there and actually watch as these officers rather clumsily and ineptly unfold the tarp. Let me say that again: we have to sit there and watch them actually unfold the whole tarp. Nobody thought that having the captain say "Bring out the tarp!" and then cutting to a scene with the men holding an open tarp would be good enough. No, that would ruin the whole film! We must watch them *unfold* the tarp! That's where all the meaning is (I guess)! The result of all this is that the scene is so slow that it becomes ridiculous, as *everyone else is just standing around*. When the targeted victims have the tarp thrown over them, they proceed to just stand around for what feels like 10 minutes, just standing there under a tarp. Remember, these were the men who were supposed to be at the breaking-point of mutiny, but they're just meekly, dumbly standing there, with a tarp on their head. For 10 minutes. The whole thing is so ridiculously paced, it comes off as amateurish. Like a 4th grade play, where the kids aren't entirely sure where exactly they're supposed to be and what exactly they're supposed to be doing. Everybody's just kind of standing around.
Frankly, I just don't see how any thinking person can consider this a great film (let alone the greatest of all time!)