When diving into this film and its reasoning I find my self shocked with how many freviews and books have been written about this particular film. At most times, I found the film very interesting. While I admit when first viewing the film I could not place my finger on what the central message was, I am now well aware.
To start off I had found that the officers on the battleship are servants of the Tsar and his empire. The sailors represent the “passionate” and “respectable” communist government. It would be easy to completely overlook that element going straight into the movie with no background knowledge of this Eisenstein work, as I was. However, the story is not completely propaganda as the events really did take place in 1905. It is how the story is told that makes it propaganda. That is one of the marvelous things about film, because it is one of the few mediums that can skew reality so much and preach on many levels, whereas other art forms cannot (DeVore, D. 2003)
To look further into this movie I turn to an article from Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times. According to Ebert the most famous scene of the movie, which is considered mandatory viewing for all serious film critics and scholars around the world, is the "Odessa steps sequence." It is very brutal to watch and not for the light hearted. After the people in a harbor town of Potemkin (after which the ship was named) start a revolution, the Tsar seeks to put it down. The Tsar's military sends soldiers to march on the revolutionaries. The soldiers are all robotic and inhuman in their motions and mannerisms, all the more reason for us to hate them. They march in a straight line down the Odessa steps, while grim music howls in the background. They shoot everyone in sight, who by this point are running away, but they are still shot in the back. Arms, legs, and hands are trampled on. When a woman runs up the stairs with a baby in her arms pleading for mercy, she is shot down....