10 Most Perfect Adventure Movies of the Last 40 Years, Ranked
Adventure movies often feel old-fashioned, but the best ones don’t feel old-fashioned in bad/detrimental ways. It’s more to do with stories about adventure having always been appealing and entertaining for hopefully obvious reasons, so there are plenty of iconic ones that have existed long before cinema was ever a thing (take The Odyssey, arguably… though, yeah, that one’s being made into a high-budget film in 2026).
Some of the best adventure movies of the past four decades have felt old-fashioned in good ways, and then a few have excelled in other regards, while feeling debatably a little more modern. There are a range of them below, but they all share a couple of things in common: they’re pretty much perfect, and they all belong either wholly, or in part, to the adventure genre.
10
‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’ (2003)
It might not have been as successful or as widely-seen as other war movies considered to be among the best of all time, but Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World debatably should’ve been. It’s remarkable, as both a war and adventure movie, being set during the Napoleonic Wars and mostly centering on the captain of a warship being driven to pursue another ship following a disastrous attack.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is kind of a chase movie, and one with a commitment to both realism and good old-fashioned spectacle/entertainment at the same time, somehow. It’s juggling a lot all at once, and manages to keep all those balls in the air the whole time, so to speak, being one of the best movies of the past couple of decades (or so) that deserved at least one sequel, but never got any.
9
‘Until the End of the World’ (1991)
This is the most obscure and underrated movie that’s going to be mentioned here, and it is admittedly quite a commitment if you want to appreciate it, but Until the End of the World is worth the effort. The theatrical cut was an already lengthy 179 minutes, yet you do have to watch the director’s cut of Until the End of the World instead, and that one’s almost two hours longer.
Since it goes for a bit under five hours, it manages to feel particularly expansive and globe-trotting in nature, even by the standards of the adventure genre, since it’s basically a road trip movie that spans different continents, and has its characters go around much of the world. On top of that, Until the End of the World is also forward-thinking (and maybe even prophetic) as a work of science fiction, all the while boasting one of the most impressive soundtracks in cinema history, too.
8
‘The Mission’ (1986)
There are a few different genres tackled throughout The Mission, so it’s not “just” an adventure movie, but the same can be said for other movies that were written by Robert Bolt (his best-known screenplay is – and probably always will be – Lawrence of Arabia). Both its main characters do undertake a journey deep into the jungles of South America, though, one of them wanting to build a mission, and the other later traveling to that mission to seek redemption.
After all that, The Mission starts to feel almost like a war movie, or at least a historical action movie, maybe a little in line with something like The Last of the Mohicans. There’s also music in The Mission that’s well worth highlighting, though instead of being a soundtrack like with Until the End of the World, it comes in the form of one of the very best scores the great Ennio Morricone ever composed.
7
‘Avatar’ (2009)
You can liken James Cameron’s work to the cinematic equivalent of great pop music. It’s easy to look down on both, because such blockbusters and such popular music look kind of easy to make, or at least there’s a sense that those behind such things might be lazy compared to those who make more complex and challenging stuff, and yet there’s such a challenge when it comes to actually delivering truly crowd-pleasing entertainment.
Cameron can do so in a seemingly effortless way, and Avatar might not demonstrate that as much as Titanic, but Titanic’s not really an adventure film, so Avatar is the Cameron film that feels most worth shouting out here. It goes to some wild and visually spectacular places, and it’s still a pretty undeniable technical achievement all these years later, which isn’t something that can be said about many movies from the 2000s that featured so much computer-generated animation.
6
‘The Princess Bride’ (1987)
No exaggeration: The Princess Bride really does have one of the best screenplays of all time, and then it’s also great in all the other ways that a movie needs to be great if it wants to be considered a masterpiece, which The Princess Bride well and truly is. It’s a fantasy/adventure/romance/comedy movie all at once, and is technically a story within a story that celebrates and gently parodies fairy tales simultaneously.
Before, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was mentioned as a movie that did a great job of juggling various things/genres at once, but The Princess Bride arguably balances even more, and does so within a briefer runtime, too. It’s one of those rare films that truly has something to offer for everyone, regardless of one’s age or general outlook on life (be it cynical or optimistic/romantic).
5
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
It’s such an obvious pick, alongside a trilogy of fantasy/adventure movies that are going to be outlined in a bit, but Mad Max: Fury Road deserves to be here, since it’s very hard to fault as an action/sci-fi/adventure movie. The adventure here is a dark and particularly desperate one, though, since like the other movies in the Mad Max series (besides the first, which is more dystopian), Fury Road is a post-apocalyptic film.
Much of it’s one extended chase sequence, plus a few scenes that are more focused on character development and non-action stuff sprinkled throughout… though never so many that the film stops feeling relentlessly energetic. So much has already been written and said about how thrilling and non-stop Mad Max: Fury Road feels, and so much more will probably continue to be written as the years go on, and this film continues to age well (in all likelihood… it’ll be surprising if it doesn’t hold up 10, 20, or even 50 years from now).
4
‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ (2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of the best animated movies of all time, and it also happens to be a sci-fi/adventure/action movie (plus some other genres, probably), so here it is. It’s all about different universes colliding, and various Spider-people having to band together to take on something that threatens all the universes, and then it’s also an origin story for Miles Morales at the same time.
And origin stories already felt a bit played-out and a little too everywhere, in 2018, yet this movie found a way to do that whole kind of narrative in an enjoyable and sometimes quite surprising way. It’s hard to say whether it’s the very best Spider-Man movie, when Spider-Man 2 (2004) also exists, but it’s more of an adventure film than that one, and it has to be admired for finding new things to do with one of the more ubiquitous superheroes in the movie world.
3
‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)
There’s an argument to be made that most of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies come pretty close to being perfect, with Princess Mononoke being especially so. It’s the best of a great bunch, in other words, and is simultaneously a fantasy movie, an adventure film, and an allegorical one about humanity and its relationship/conflict with the natural world, as much of the premise here concerns the people of an industrial town warring with beings living in a nearby forest.
Since it’s directed by Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli, Princess Mononoke is stunning throughout, on a visual front.
Obviously, since it’s directed by Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli, Princess Mononoke is stunning throughout, on a visual front, and proves similarly enthralling as far as the aural side of things is concerned, too (since it might well be the best-composed score of Joe Hisaishi’s). You can’t really go wrong with anything here, so this being considered an all-timer however you want to define or classify it feels fitting.
2
‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)
The Jurassic Park series has just kept on trucking, post-1993, and is now technically the Jurassic World series (probably/maybe?), but it’s unlikely that anything will ever top the original. This is almost as good as sci-fi/adventure movies get, being about a group of people visiting a theme park featuring dinosaurs that have been brought to life through science before the park officially opens, but then pretty much everything goes wrong.
Once they’re on the island, the film stays there as well, which might make it a little different from a globe-trotting sort of adventure movie, but it fits within the genre because there’s an element of adventuring inherent to the premise, what with people going to that island and all. It’s got some fierce competition for the title of “best Steven Spielberg adventure movie,” seeing as Raiders of the Lost Ark exists, though that one’s more than 40 years old, so Jurassic Park wins out – and gets included – here.
1
‘The Lord of the Rings’ (2001–2003)
You could put any of the movies in The Lord of the Rings trilogy here, or you can put the trilogy as a whole, including it as one big three-part film, and either way, placement in the top spot’s earned. This is maybe the greatest achievement in blockbuster filmmaking of the century so far, and it’s a monumental epic that does justice to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel of the same name, even if it’s not 100% faithful, as an adaptation.
It gets the basics across and then some, and it makes the story work well in a different format, which might’ve seemed like too challenging a task until it was actually pulled off by Peter Jackson and co. Sorry to be a bit predictable, by celebrating this particular trilogy here, at the end of all lists, but it really is that good, and all the praise that’s been thrown its way over the past 20+ years has been more than well-earned.
