i have no idea why people like this movie, there's nothing about it that was done right. the action is clumsy and unrealistic, the acting is miserable, the subtitles were translated by somebody who had terrible command of the english language, it was boring and untastefully propogandic. the only good thing i can say about it is that the music was pretty decent

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#232

An impressive film for it's era although the action is not amazing, it's still grand. The closed captioning is good if you're trying to learn Russian too, because the translation is almost literal.

I thought the action was good for a propaganda movie. Music was good and those Teutonic Knight costumes were super cool. Bad: it sure is filled with propaganda. We get it, Hitler is evil, Japan is evil, Stalin is good, Religion is for the Bourgeoisie, real men like to fish after a glorious battle.

Heavy-handed Stalinist propaganda, but the music is great, the costumes and sets are wonderful, and the battle sequences--featuring a goodly percentage of the Soviet army--are simply amazing.

Nothing really happened in this film. They had a few battles and some talks. The technical aspects were "okay", and the rest was plain bad.

"Alexandre Nevsky" is as historically important as it is lethally boring. Not as visually audacious as Eisenstein's previous alleged classics ("Bronenosets Potyomkin" and "Oktyabr") and containing absolutely zero interesting elements -the plot is borderline, the characters nonexistent and the heavy-handed Russian patriotism distracting, this glorification of a legendary 13th century warrior fills film historians with glee and leaves everyone else yawning.

# 220

Hideously awful. Imagine Ed Wood doing a historical battle epic. Even the Prokofiev score sucks

The acting is awful and the propaganda about as subtle as a kick in the teeth (the story of inhuman Teutonic invaders defiling the great mother Russia? In 1938? Difficult to see the parallels there!), but Alexander Nevsky is wonderful for two reasons: the beautiful direction by Eisenstein, and the utterly magnificent score by Prokofiev. Worth a butcher's.

A gem of a silent film with a fantastic score by Sergei Prokofiev.

Potent cinema, silly dialogue, even dumber history.

It has three major problems that keep it from being a movie I would want to see again: 1) The acting is pretty awful, 2) the propoganda is utterly lacking in subtlety, and 3) for the most part, it's dull as dirt. However, it so packed from start to end with astonishing, gorgeous, memorable images that I have to admit that from a photographic standpoint, it is truly a great film.

Really hard to take seriously once they start lobbing babies into pyres.

To say this lacks subtlety is to miss that it made no attempt to be subtle. It's not a historical epic with propaganda thrown in, it's blatant propaganda with a historical veneer to tie things together, and that veneer is a dull badly told story. But the images are striking, the battle scenes rousing and the score magnificent. Whether that makes this worth watching depends on how strongly you feel about proRussian antiGerman propaganda, and how much boredom you can take for technical proficiency

Certainly seems the big boys' Eisenstein, with battle and war song. Surely it's just as much a musical as anything else? But sadly Nevsky seems to lack the iconic statuesque visuals of Ivan and the compelling speed and torment of one of his war montages. I did, however, enjoy the silver sheen reminiscent of Man Ray. I haven't a clue how that was achieved (silver chloride toning? silver gelatin?) and it gave an impressive surrealist hue from armour to eye-ball. Oh, and Gavrilo. Wow.

Epic, larger than life characters, wonderfully delivered, heroic lines, the first great movie villain ever, (the priest in black who menacingly plays the piano) and a tremendous final battle whose scale is still impressive today. Maybe I'm biased because I'm Russian, but there is ample reason why such a seemingly simple propaganda film was such an integral part of Soviet culture for decades.

Propaganda is fun.

217

As with Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein displays his ability to create magnificent visual sequences with dynamic and expressive camerawork and with fantastic editing (both aided by a wonderful Prokofiev score), but as a storyteller he is very flat and dull.