Battleship Potemkin

This is one of the most legendary films of all time. It helped to popularize the montage, which many films since have taken for granted. It's been voted as one of the greatest films of all time.

And I was bored during it.

Why? Was it the action sequences? No; action sequences can be interesting if they have a point. Was it the pro-communist viewpoint? No; that hardly mattered. Rather, it was the Worn-Out Experiment Syndrome: When you view a movie hailed as innovative and can't see why, because the techniques it developed have been so absorbed by the mainstream that it's invisible.

This isn't always bad. "Jules & Jim" used many techniques that I could hardly spot during the film, and yet it worked nonetheless. However, there the film worked because the story came first and foremost. Here, the techniques were pretty much the entire reason I watched it.

The story, for those who don't know: A bunch of sailors get Revolutionary Fever for reasons I don't recall. When they refuse to eat meat that an apparently corrupt doctor declares okay (despite maggots crawling around on it), they're to be killed. When this is about to happen, the other crew members help them out and throw the higher-ups off the ship.
They then proceed to Odessa, where they lay to rest one of the few sailors who was killed. The people cheer them on. This apparently gets the attention of the local authorities, because soon, a firing squad opens fire on civilians. (You know the baby-carriage-down-the-stairs scene from "The Untouchables?" This is where they got that from.)
The Battleship gets away and has to go through a squadron of battleships. They prepare to fire, but end up not having to; the other sailors cheer them on.

As you can tell, I'm confused by what happened in the film. Maybe my copy was butchered, but several loose ends are left untied. For example, Moses seems to be on the Battleship near the beginning. I have no idea of why; maybe I missed something. But after about two scenes, he disappears, with practically no effect on the plot. What did I miss?

Also, the ending makes no sense. Why do they have to go through the squadron? Why do they prepare to fire at them? Why do the sailors cheer them on? (I could understand that if they felt threatened they might cheer just to save themselves, but if I recall correctly, they're cheering with Revolutionary Fever.)

Is it me? Am I intolerant of silent films? I have gotten bored by one other ("The General" [!]). But that wasn't it. If the film had sound, I'd still have been confused and bored.

So what did I miss? Was it my copy of the film (by Image Entertainment)? Was the film entirely reliant upon the montage technique (which nowadays is practically invisible to modern audiences)? Could someone tell me? Is anybody reading this?