The political message is questionable but technically this movie is a milestone

Rating: 9/10 (18 December 2011)

The works of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein in the early days of Soviet Union's cinema easily beats anything Hollywood published at the same time. The score is bombastic, the images are intense and the avant-garde camera shootings and runs are innovating. Even a century after its creation, the scenes on the Odessa staircase are still highly impressive.
For Eisenstein, cinema was an art with many facets and his attraction montage fusions the meanings of images, words and music into a powerful and baffling piece of art. This movie works a lot with contrasts. You can see the small and dark rooms of the sailors and the big and light rooms of the tsarist officers. You can see the beautiful dishes with religious inscriptions for the rich personal on board and the foul dead meat for the sailors. You can see the sadness of a despaired woman that loses her young child that is shot in the back while you can see the pitiless army that creates an incredible bloodbath. The movie focuses on the rebellion and solidarity of a crowd and not of a single hero and already represents early Soviet ideals but the acting of many single persons is simply incredible and very close to theatre if you take a look at the expression on the faces of the actors. This movie is filled with details and close to perfection from an artistic point of view.
Of course, there is a lot of symbolism in the movie and a lot of propaganda but as censorship wasn't yet as extreme as it would be during the next three decades under the tyranny of a powerful madman called Stalin this movie still portrays the opinion of Eisenstein who comes from Latvia that had been annexed by the Russian tsar. It's more a revolutionary movie than a propaganda movie and is not so far from true historic facts as it is the case for movie such as "The Birth Of A Nation" or "Der Jude Süss". Still, this slight slices of propaganda are reason enough to cut off one point from the final rating.
This is a truly artistic movie that any fan of cinema should at least once see in his lifetime. If you haven't seen it yet and doubt its quality, don't hesitate any longer. Even if the political message is definitely questionable, this short flick is definitely bombastic, epic and always entertaining.