Great at the End, Very Political Before Then

Rating: 8/10 (13 July 2015)

From the title I expected this to be a war movie, but I did not realize Algiers is a city, and the battle is actually a struggle for Algerians to live in their home country without fear of the French who are suppressing them.
I've seen very critically acclaimed classic foreign films before, so I guess I might have had my expectations too high. For example, two of my favorite foreign films are "Bicycle Thieves" and "Rashomon," but those films actually do interesting things with their camera-work. With The Battle of Algiers we just get a lot of standard (boring) camera-work with a lot of static shots to focus on conversations about the action rather than focusing on the action itself.
The best aspect of the film is the characters who are a part of the rebellion and their motivations. We are introduced to one of the main characters in a very interesting way - this secret group of rebels does an initiation on Ali by checking to see if he would be loyal enough to shoot a cop, but they don't tell him this. We can see the manipulation this group exercises, though in their eyes it is necessary recruitment, and we should see it as this too since it is the Algerians who are the victim to French occupation of the city of Algiers as well as of the entire nation of Algeria.
With the filmmakers choosing to revisit a scene from different view points there is obviously non-linear chronology, but I only understood this at the beginning and towards the end of the film. I was confused how the scene fit into the scenes surrounding it when it was shown for the second time in the film. I will have to rewatch this film some time in the future - after all it is regarded as one of the most important films ever made.
I think I enjoyed the conclusion of this film much more than any part which preceded it, and that's because the conclusion is the most inspirational sequence of the entire movie. It is uplifting to see how Algerians rise up again years after the first rebellion group is decapitated (a metaphor you will understand if you watch the film), and this happens without great explanation. The message implied by the film is that this first group of rebels may not have been successful, but the group inspired the people of its nation to stand strong for justice.