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PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

elcoat In the late 1930s, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were already deadly enemies, ideologically and in reality in the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler was orating expansively about conquering and enslaving "inferior" Slavs and colonizing the East, quite like the Catholic Teutonic Knights had attempted to do on their Eastern Crusades against Orthodox Slavs.Film-making was still in its infancy with creative geniuses exploring all its potential. One of those geniuses was Sergey Eisenstein, who (after misadventures in the West) directed one of the greatest patriotic films of all time, Alexander Nevsky.And Sergey Prokofiev's musical score splendidly heightens the film's impact and has become treated as classical music itself (leading me to wonder why American film scores aren't treated the same way).With war between Greater Germany and the Soviet Union appearing imminent, this story was an appeal to Russians' ethnic tradition of endurance, resistance, and victory against aggression from the West.The Teutonic Knights appear formidable and cruel, dressed in heavy armor and helmets (including one with a hand giving an obviously Nazi salute) and throwing babies into the flames of the taken and destroyed city of Pskov. Panicked, the city fathers of Novgorod go to Prince Aleksandr Nevskii, asking him to raise an army of peasants and nobles to fight the Teutons and save Novgorod ... and Russia ... from enslavement.And this he does. Some of the filmed scenes are fascinating, of The Battle on Ice - on what is now Lake Chud, or Peipus as you prefer - for example. Armies are fighting on ice, and when that breaks under the heavier German armor you see knights and men at arms slipping and sliding down into the icy water to drown. (The battle on ice scene in Jerry Bruckheimer's recent film King Arthur is directly reminiscent.) Some of the Germans, like the priests and organist, are ridiculed caricatures, and the Russian traitors are dealt with contemptuously - and theatrically. One of the funniest and presumably unrehearsed shots is of Nevsky and his aide riding toward the camera across the ice before the battle. The aide's horse (and the aide) slip on the ice and go sprawling, then to re-mount and ride on.But the message of the film - which is no less timely today, with NATO threatening Russia with political agitation in the Ukraine and with (offensive) tank maneuvers in the Baltic countries - is, as Aleksandr (actor Nikolai Cherkasov) says ... to us in the West ... "Go tell all in foreign lands that Russia lives! Those who come to us in peace will be welcomed as guests. But those who come to us sword in hand will die by the sword! On that Russia stands and forever will we stand!" Thus, it was no mere coincidence that in April 1999 - when we were betraying Bush1's reassurance to Gorbachev (that we would not take advantage of Russia's weakness while it attempted to demilitarize and democratize) by aggressively/illegally forcing the Kosovo war on its protégé Serbia with Appendix B of the Rambouillet Treaty - Russian film director A. Andronnikov donned medieval armor and rode a horse to fire an arrow onto the door of the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Moscow with the message "Those who act against Slavs by the sword will die by the sword." And in this context, we should also be remembering that Russia is a nuclear superpower and has already directly/domestically fought and survived total war, unlike us.Readers here might be interested in my memorial dedication to my free print-and-play boardgame Stalingrad: Gorod Smerti on my CoatneyHistory webpage.

Martin Bradley Hardly subtle. Eisenstein made this glorious piece of propaganda primarily as a warning to Hitler and the Nazis. It's about a time in the 13th century when Russia famously defeated the invading Germans under the leadership of Alexander NEVSKY, and there's no doubt as to just how evil these Germans are; at one point we see them throwing babies on the fire, (and in keeping with good Communist propaganda the Germans are the Christians forever flaunting their crucifixes). There's really nothing in the film except the call to arms and the battle that followed, (and its immediate aftermath), but what a battle it is, perhaps the finest and most famous ever put on film, (just as Prokofiev's accompanying score is among the finest ever composed for for a movie). There are images here as fine as any put on film and what other director handled crowd scenes in the way that Eisenstein did. It's not all perfect, of course. The dialogue is clunkier than the armor and the performances more wooden than the shields but primarily this is a visual epic and, as such, it's one of the classics of Russian cinema.

WanaxOdysseus This might surprise some, but in this film, Eisenstein lays down the model for how to create a montage for a pre-modern battle scene. To my knowledge, all movies dealing with such scenes have used essentially the same template. This comes from the scenes when the Russian army is waiting for the Teutons coming over the ice. When you see this sequence, you will never see movies like Braveheart or the Two Towers the same way again. f Moreover, for those who care about such things, the movie actually manages to be truer to how battles were waged than many more contemporary films - you can actually tell how these forces fight on formation!Aside from these aspects, the film also showcases Eisenstein's directorial genius throughout, so it's really a must-see for anyone interested in his contributions to the development of cinema.

dromasca Great directors must be judged not only by their masterpieces but also by their failures. When talking about Eisenstein 'Alexandr Nevskiy' is such a failure, but it's not easy to judge Eisenstein upon it, as it is so obvious that most of the failure of this film do not belong to him.'AN' is a piece of anti-German propaganda made in 1938 on the eve of the second world war and of the conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. To make points clear the authors fill in the film with such ridiculous details as having the 13th century Teutonic soldiers wear Wehrmacht-like helmets or the 20th century German effigy painted on the Teutonic flags. The conflict is extremely schematic and stereotype and it takes the full power of such a great actor as Nikolai Tschekasov was to give some life to the main character, while most if not all the other characters fall into ridicule or close.Yet, there are glimpses of great cinema in this film. The battle scene while not reaching the heights of the mass scenes in 'Potemkin' is well conceived and orchestrated, and the rendition of the German leaders has hypnotic power, with the Dark Monk figure looking like a cinematic father of Bergman's death angel and grandfather of Darth Vader. Best of all is the combination between Eisenstein's visuals and Prokofiev's musical score. Actually music is so good while text is so bad that I believe that it would have been much better if the whole text was sung rather than spoken - it would have been the first or one of the first filmed operas in history, not a forgettable propaganda film in the career of an extraordinary director.