Are we living in a golden age for adventure movies? On the one hand, superhero franchises dominate box offices and hoover up production budgets. That success, however, has rendered studios more risk-averse; they rarely invest in the kind of fresh, fantastical stories that breathed new life into blockbuster cinema in the late Seventies and Eighties. Adventure movies, at their best, are supposed to lead us on journeys beyond our wildest imagination. It’s hard to achieve that within the tightly-controlled, sequel-obsessed Marvel industrial complex.
So, no – regardless of whether you think the true golden age sat towards the beginning or end of the 20th century, it’s still pretty far behind us. But you can revisit those action-packed eras any time you wish. All you need to do is check out our line-up of the ten best adventure films ever made.
The Princess Bride (1987)
A best-of list without The Princess Bride? Inconceivable. This postmodern fairy tale has gained a huge cult fandom since its lukewarm release in 1987 (the cast recently did a virtual table read as a fundraiser for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin). Hilarious and endlessly quotable, director Rob Reiner’s tale is framed in the storybook world of Florin, where a handsome, eyebrow-arching farmhand named Westley (Cary Elwes) has to save his one true love, a beautiful noblewoman named Buttercup (Robin Wright), from the clutches of evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon). He too wants her for his wife, but the royal runs into his own problems when a gang of three outsiders kidnap her before the wedding. That trio includes legendary fencer Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), who boasts one of the greatest lines in cinema history: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.”
Captain Blood (1935)
A lavish, swashbuckling black-and-white epic that introduced the world to Erol Flynn. He plays Dr Peter Blood, a British doctor in the 1600s who is tried for treason after treating a man who took part in the rebellion against King James II. He’s sold into slavery in Jamaica, but manages to make a break for the high seas and becomes a pirate in the Brotherhood of Buckaneers. But an unexpected reunion with his former owner, Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland) twists his fate even further. Based on the 1922 novel by Rafael Sabatini, it improved drastically upon the original silent adaptation that arrived twelve years prior.
Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
The original and the best. Set in 1936, Harrison Ford plays an inconceivably handsome, bullwhip-cracking archaeologist tasked with saving humanity from Nazis, who are attempting to steal an ancient Egyptian Ark that is rumoured to make any army invincible. Director Steven Spielberg described Raiders of the Lost Ark as “the first movie where I actually shot the movie without thinking”, but it’s not mindless by any measure. George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan’s sharp, tongue-in-cheek dialogue makes just as much of an impact as the iconic set pieces, and Indiana Jones’s combination of coolness and vulnerability set a new standard for action heroes.
The Goonies (1985)
This time around, it was Steven Spielberg who handed over his story to another director – specifically Richard Donner, who had previously won plaudits in the late Seventies for his take on Superman. The Goonies tells the story of a gang of kids from the fictional ‘Goon Docks’ district of Astoria, Oregon, who are desperate to stop the demolition of their homes at the hand of an uncaring country club. Rummaging through an attic on their last weekend together, they stumble upon an old Spanish doubloon and a treasure map. These curiosities soon guide the boys on a fast-paced, perilous underground journey, in which they encounter a pirate ship, a rival gang and hidden treasure – as well as a route to saving their beloved docks.
The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi-Toride No San-Akunin, 1958)
George Lucas has openly acknowledged that The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa’s critically acclaimed 1958 samurai classic, was a huge inspiration behind Star Wars. Truth is, all of the New Hollywood upstarts – Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola – looked up to the Japanese auteur, one of the first to successfully cross over to Western audiences. In The Hidden Fortress, a 16th century civil war pulls two feuding peasants, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Mataschichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), together for an unexpected job: escorting a couple to safety in return for gold. Little do they know, however, that they are safeguarding a princess in disguise. It’s a surprisingly fun (and predictably profound) piece of work from one of Japan’s film greats, and a true must-watch.
Cast Away (2000)
Hopes were high for Cast Away. Too high, realistically. Six years earlier in 1994, director Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks’ had won six Academy Awards and a haul of other international trophies for Forrest Gump. Now they were teaming up again, armed with almost double the budget, on a suffocatingly lonely survival tale about a FedEx employee who is plucked from his comfortable life when he crash lands on a deserted island in the South Pacific. Following his performance as the wide-eyed Forrest, Hanks was excited to delve into the concept of hopelessness; of deprivation and mental descent. It didn’t win either of its Academy Award nominations, for best actor or sound, and reviews at the time blew hot and cold. But both the strength and ambition of Hanks’ performance, and the maturity of Zemeckis’s direction, hold up to this day.
The Treasure Of Sierra Madre (1948)
One of the few films that holds a coveted 100 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating. The Treasure of Sierra Madre is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a story of greed-based moral decay and corruption: two wanderers, played by Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt, join forces with a prospector in search of gold, but soon descend into paranoia and avarice. The men fear betrayal, and all plan to pull the trigger before it’s too late. It doesn’t help that Mexican bandits are lurking in the shadows, too, ready to pounce on the trio at any moment. It’s a true classic that deftly confronts man’s propensity for evil in the search of personal gain.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
For our money the best entry in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, even if it wasn’t the one to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. That’s mostly down to the incredible set-pieces, most notably the 40-minute spectacle of the Battle of Helm’s Deep (the best on-screen battle ever? Maybe), but it’s also because Two Towers effectively communicates Tolkien’s most important lessons: that all men are fallible, that help should always be welcomed, and that hope is forever on the horizon. Plus: who doesn’t like a talking tree? It was the novel that needed the most tinkering with from Peter Jackson and his crew, but they made it work – and more.
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