in a word, magnificent

Rating: 10/10 (5 July 2010)

There's very little I can say about Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece "Battleship Potemkin" that hasn't been said and said better by my fellow reviewers on this site.
At 85 years old, this story of a ship's mutiny that leads to a Russian massacre still holds up - and you can't say that about a lot of 85-year-olds. In fact, if one were to have The Odessa Steps segment in a film today, it would be met with with the same jaw-dropping amazement as it must have been in 1925.
Besides his brilliant montages, Eisenstein gives us some awesome visual moments - the parades of people walking down to the ship, the fuel of the ship curling out against the ocean sky; the sails on the water, and the dramatic way the film ends as the ship moves toward us - all breathtaking.
But I am in complete amazement over The Odessa Steps segment, the entire thing, of which the massacre on the steps is a part. The baby carriage part was homaged in "The Untouchables" - the whole thing is mind-boggling.
A must see.