10 Best Epic Adventure Movies, Ranked
Plenty of adventure movies feel epic, but what about adventure movies that are genuine epics? Admittedly, there are fewer, but not dramatically so. For present purposes, something’s counted as an adventure movie if a large part of the film involves traveling somewhere, especially if the conflict/drama comes about from the journey, and something’s an epic if it spans at least a decent amount of time, and has a runtime of over 2.5 hours.
That definition of an epic isn’t like the objectively true one, but it’s what’s being applied here, just so length is emphasized, and you really feel like whatever kind of adventuring featured is sufficiently grand. It’s also the reason there aren’t any Star Wars movies here, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is also one minute shy of 2.5 hours, so that just missed the cutoff, too (it’s an excellent sci-fi and sort of adventure film, of course, and nearly two-and-a-half hours is still quite long).
10
‘The Revenant’ (2015)
If not for The Great Silence, The Revenant would probably be the coldest Western of all time. Also, like that 1968 spaghetti Western, The Revenant matches all the cold scenery it depicts with a sense of brutality and a story about desperation and despair. It’s not a fun time, but you shouldn’t really expect that, given it’s about a man being betrayed and left for dead in the wilderness, only to hang on to life and then set out on a journey to get vengeance.
The sense of adventure in some of the soon-to-be-mentioned movies might be kind of fun and inspiring, yet that’s not so here. The Revenant starts out feeling savage, and then maintains that feeling throughout, refusing to let up. It’s also quite the endurance test beyond the content and where it goes thematically, thanks to its epic-length runtime of 157 minutes.
9
‘Until the End of the World’ (1991)
While Until the End of the World might not show up too often in various rankings that concern all-time great adventure movies, perhaps it should. Admittedly, the adventuring mostly takes place during the film’s first half, while the second half slows things down a bit and starts exploring more by way of science fiction concepts, doing that just as effectively as the earlier stretch of the film functions as something like an international road movie.
Narratively, it goes to about as many places as a single film can go when the setting is restricted to “just” Earth. Also, as an epic, Until the End of the World does not disappoint, since the director’s cut (which is the only cut worth paying attention to) is nearly five hours long. But sincerely, it’s more than worth five hours of your time, being incredibly rewarding if you find yourself with pretty much an entire afternoon free.
8
‘King Kong’ (2005)
The King Kong series doesn’t have as many entries as either the Godzilla or James Bond series, if you’re talking long-runners that contain the most by way of individual films. But King Kong is the king time-wise, as the original movie came out way back in 1933, with a decent number of follow-ups and some remakes in the decades since, with 2005’s King Kong being the best of the remakes so far.
It’s a lot of movie, and maybe even close to too much movie, yet the parts that prove thrilling and entertaining make it worth devoting approximately three hours to.
Granted, it’s really only got the 1976 film for competition, but still, this epic-scale monster movie is pretty great, at least at times. It’s a lot of movie, and maybe even close to too much movie, yet the parts that prove thrilling and entertaining make it worth devoting approximately three hours to (it’s not nearly the best epic that Peter Jackson has directed, but more on that one – or those three, technically – in a bit).
7
‘Avatar’ (2009)
For now, Avatar is part of one massive blockbuster trilogy, and if a fourth and fifth movie end up getting made (or more, who knows?), then it’ll be part of something inevitably even bigger. For now, though, Avatar (2009) functions the best as a standalone sci-fi/adventure movie, albeit one that does obviously leave a good many threads open, and then the sequel went ahead and found some new threads to tackle anyway, thanks to a big time skip and ways it brought back various cast members whose characters had already died.
Anyway, Avatar is about the military setting up a base on the moon of Pandora, and one member of the military finding himself inevitably siding with the indigenous population there. It’s been done before, but that’s okay, because Avatar does (or re-does) it well, and with tons of creativity put into the world you ultimately get to explore alongside the protagonist.
6
‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ (1963)
Just because it’s a comedy doesn’t mean It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World shouldn’t be admired as an epic, too. It’s a rare slapstick epic, with a premise that involves a group of very self-centered people finding out about some buried treasure, and then they all set off trying to get to it before any of the others. It’s a bit like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but not a Western, with more broad comedy, and with a whole lot more characters.
If you’re not wild about physical comedy and mayhem played for laughs, then It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World could well get a little tiring, at a point, yet there’s also something to be said for the act of pushing everything too far being itself quite funny. You have to admire the commitment to the bit; the act of having such a bit play out for over three hours, if you watch the longest cut of the movie.
5
‘Interstellar’ (2014)
While Oppenheimer is a longer movie directed by Christopher Nolan, that 2023 epic was in no way identifiable as an adventure movie, for hopefully obvious reasons. Interstellar, on the other hand, kind of is, even if the primary genre is science fiction, owing to it being about people traveling into deep space in search of a new planet for humanity to live on, since the Earth is very much in the process of dying.
It certainly goes to some interesting places, as a film, and then the characters also go to some more than interesting places, too. Interstellar swings big and largely sticks the landing, being ambitious even by Nolan’s standards, and also feeling hard to fault on a technical front. It’s a beautiful-looking and sounding movie, with its emotional core proving surprisingly effective, too (albeit maybe a tad sappy in the eyes of some… it’s certainly quite sentimental for a sci-fi movie, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing).
4
‘Ben-Hur’ (1959)
Ben-Hur is an essential classic epic; one of those borderline-untouchable ones, really. And it’s not too hard to see why, because there’s so much about it that’s immense, and there are aspects to the story that feel timelessly appealing, because much of it’s about revenge and, later, redemption, with quite a good deal of travel involved for Judah Ben-Hur as the film’s wronged protagonist. That’s kind of putting it mildly, but there’s plenty of runtime here for a lot of things to happen.
Of course, it all peaks with the chariot race sequence, which is still – and maybe forever will be – one of the greatest scenes in cinema history. The scale of the production elsewhere is nothing to scoff at, and Ben-Hur has more than earned its reputation as an early crowd-pleaser… one of the earliest that can still probably please your average crowd, including the members of said crowd who might not usually love movies that are more than several decades old.
3
‘The Right Stuff’ (1983)
Not enough people talk about The Right Stuff. People must’ve talked about it to some extent, back in 1983, or at least people who voted for the Oscars did, since The Right Stuff was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four of those nominations, so that’s something. Yet it didn’t make back its money at the domestic box office, and nowadays, it still feels underrated and overlooked.
It’s the definitive movie about the Space Race, and – as insane as this might sound – handles the topic the same way The Princess Bride handles fairy tales. Like, The Right Stuff finds a certain romance, spectacle, and comedy within this whole narrative, bouncing around tonally in a way that shouldn’t work, but does… like how The Princess Bride is an endearing fairy tale and something of a parody of fairy tales. For the writing alone, The Right Stuff is miraculous, and yet it’s a masterpiece on all other fronts, too, being so much more than “just” a good screenplay.
2
‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962)
Like Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia is about as essential as old-school epic movies ever got, and it functions as an adventure and World War I film on top of being an epic and a character study. The film spans about four hours all up, or close to it, and while the idea of it doing a lot within that runtime might not sound too wild, it’s still surprising just how much Lawrence of Arabia manages to do.
You could remove all the great elements and moments here and spread them out over, like, a dozen normal-length movies, and all those normal-length movies would still (probably) be pretty good. That’s to say that Lawrence of Arabia is positively overflowing with greatness, and the extent to which its reputation precedes it is ultimately more than understandable.
1
‘The Lord of the Rings’ (2001–2003)
Counting The Lord of the Rings as one massive project, or entire story, it’s easy to put it in the #1 spot here. There’s a large cast of characters here, and many of them travel a great distance, especially Frodo and Sam, what with the former being tasked with carrying the One Ring, and the latter having to be there for him every step of the way. And that way involves so very many steps.
Elsewhere, there’s a continually building conflict that involves some huge battle sequences spanning an entire continent that’s eventually at war, so calling The Lord of the Rings epic is an understatement. It begins and ends amazingly well, and then everything in between is also spectacular. You can’t go wrong here, and that it’s so flawless and so long (at about nine hours for the theatrical versions, and 11-ish hours if you watch the extended cuts) is truly remarkable.
