It’s always nice to see two unlikely genres paired together, and, at first glance, a typical war movie is likely to be quite different from a typical adventure movie. Though war films often see characters traveling to foreign lands, this does not necessarily make such stories qualify as adventure-focused ones. It’s a bit dangerous to assume that, given how, historically speaking, one way young men were sometimes convinced to sign up to take part in war was because it was sold as an adventure (1981’s Gallipoli shows this quite strikingly).

A good many war movies are grim and decidedly not adventurous in spirit, and rightly so, but with a little tweaking tonally and/or narratively, war movies can get away with also being adventure movies. Sometimes, they’re more comedic in nature, and other times, the thrills and excitement of going somewhere unfamiliar are balanced out well with anti-war sentiments or themes. The following films tend to do one or the other, and can all be considered great war-adventure movies.

10 ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ (1970)

Director: Brian G. Hutton

Kelly’s Heroes has a remarkable cast, so much so that that’s probably the first thing that jumps out about it. It gave Clint Eastwood an early starring role, with supporting cast members here including the likes of Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, and Don Rickles. It’s also one of the funnier World War II movies out there, with it being about a chaotic mission American soldiers go on – while AWOL – to rob a bank behind enemy lines.

There’s a novelty in seeing a heist movie take place during World War II, and making things comedic also helps give Kelly’s Heroes a distinctive identity. It’s good escapist fun, even if it can ultimately be a little strange to see a story set during the deadliest war of the 20th century be so jam-packed with comedy and general silliness.

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9 ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ (2005)

Director: Ridley Scott

Even if it might fall a little shy of being one of the very best Ridley Scott movies, Kingdom of Heaven is still an overall very good one, so long as you avoid the infamous theatrical cut and devote 3+ hours of your time to the director’s cut. It’s up there as a definitive movie about the Crusades, following a blacksmith as he slowly gets more embroiled in the conflict.

It’s that journey that gives Kingdom of Heaven the feeling of an adventure movie, with a good deal of travel playing out in the first half, and the big battle sequences are mostly saved for the second half. Kingdom of Heaven impresses when it comes to scale and action, and more than earns the right to have a runtime that exceeds three hours, making it odd that the shortened and inferior theatrical cut ever existed in the first place.

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8 ‘The Guns of Navarone’ (1961)

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Expertly combining thriller, war, and adventure genres into one satisfying package of a film, The Guns of Navarone is old-fashioned yet still exciting, not to mention thoroughly entertaining. It’s set during World War II, but feels a little more serious than something like the aforementioned Kelly’s Heroes, here being about saboteurs tasked with destroying a pair of long-range field guns housed on a well-defended island populated by Nazi forces.

The Guns of Navarone does take its time, not exactly being an all-out action movie and patiently unfolding over a runtime that exceeds 2.5 hours, but it does stay pretty gripping throughout. It’s a simple premise executed well, and it also helps that the cast here is also great, something a given when the top-billed actors include the likes of Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn.

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7 ‘Spartacus’ (1960)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

The most epic Stanley Kubrick film, Spartacus, is also arguably the least Kubrickian, but that’s okay for anyone expecting something that’s a little more like Ben-Hur than it is say Barry Lyndon. Spartacus has a huge cast and a beefy runtime of over three hours, but it’s well worth devoting that much time to, capturing the dramatic and eventful life of its titular character, a slave who ends up leading a rebellion against Rome.

The protagonist builds his army as he travels from place to place, with this ensuring Spartacus grows in scale as it approaches its climax, gradually becoming more of a full-on war movie all the while. It’s grand, big-budget filmmaking done right, and could well be up there as one of the best epic movies of its time (which is really saying something, because the 1950s and 1960s were something of a golden age for that genre).

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6 ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’ (2003)

Director: Peter Weir

There’s a surprisingly high number of action/thriller/adventure movies set largely at sea, with Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World being one of the all-time best in this department. It follows a British Royal Navy captain relentlessly pursuing a French warship at all costs, devoting himself wholly to vengeance in a way that continually threatens the safety of both himself and his crew.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World famously didn’t find much of an audience upon release, but was well-regarded critically and certainly deserved better as far as box office takings were concerned. It feels fittingly like an adventure movie while also managing to drive home some anti-war sentiments, balancing such things well and finding an interesting angle to explore through its main character (played extremely well by Russell Crowe).

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5 ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ (1992)

Director: Michael Mann

It’s not surprising that when you combine Michael Mann as director and Daniel Day-Lewis as the leading actor, the resulting movie is a great one. Said great movie is The Last of the Mohicans, and it notably feels like something of an outlier within both Mann and Day-Lewis’ respective bodies of work, given Mann doesn’t tend to direct historical dramas and Day-Lewis isn’t typically associated with action/adventure movies.

Adapting the James Fenimore Cooper novel of the same name, The Last of the Mohicans takes place during a period of warfare between French and British forces over American land during the 18th century, eventually focusing on a perilous rescue mission and an extended fight for survival. It’s a film that aims to do a lot in under two hours, and is largely successful, proving exciting, suspenseful, grand, and even a little romantic, too.

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4 ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967)

Director: Robert Aldrich

Befitting its title, The Dirty Dozen is a pretty down-and-dirty kind of movie, likely surprising audiences back in 1967 and still feeling effectively gritty/intense when watched today, more than half a century on from release. The premise is simple but genius, following the recruitment of military prisoners who are told they will receive pardons for their crimes if they take part in – and survive – what’s essentially a suicide mission.

It’s well-structured and paced, developing characters well in the first two acts and then saving most of the action for the third and final act. It’s one of the most entertaining of all World War II movies, and can be counted alongside other great, boundary-pushing movies from the late 1960s – like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch – that proved unafraid to rock the boat, so to speak, when it came to depicting violence on screen.

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3 ‘The General’ (1926)

Directors: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman

Proving to be a significant film in the development of the action genre, The General still feels exciting, funny, and imaginative to this day, even as it approaches its 100th anniversary. It takes place during the American Civil War, which ended a little over 60 years before The General came out, so it’s possible some people who saw the film in cinemas would’ve been able to remember the actual conflict.

All that being said (it is interesting to think about, admit it), The General isn’t too concerned with being a war movie, because a serious depiction of war takes a backseat to a comedic adventure that involves one man stopping at nothing to rescue both his beloved train and the woman he’s madly in love with. It has a similar structure to Mad Max: Fury Road, really, being about a madcap rush to one location, and then an extended chase of sorts back in the other direction (both films are tonally different, sure, but there are structural similarities, and each prove spectacular in their own ways).

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2 ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962)

Director: David Lean

Of all the adventure movies to have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Lawrence of Arabia is undoubtedly one of the very best, and it’s pretty common to see it rank as one of the best movies of all time (regardless of genre), really. It takes place during World War I, but is much more than just a World War I movie, painting a psychologically intense portrait of T.E. Lawrence, and the things he did both during and after the First World War.

Similarly, just calling it an adventure movie is also underselling it, as Lawrence of Arabia aims to do a lot of things narratively and genre-wise across its epic runtime that reaches almost four hours in total. It’s big, it’s bold, and it looks and sounds great, having a timeless quality that’ll likely ensure it continues to be considered a classic until the end of time.

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1 ‘The Great Escape’ (1963)

Director: John Sturges

Putting the word “Great” in a movie’s title could well be setting people up for disappointment, but thankfully, The Great Escape delivers and ends up achieving genuine greatness. It’s a classic through and through, being perhaps the definitive prisoner of war movie, and an all-time great prison escape film, detailing the titular escape’s planning stages, the execution of the plan, and then the aftermath.

It’s the last of those stages that does give The Great Escape the eventual feeling of an adventure movie, because before then, it’s naturally quite restrictive in terms of setting (after all, the film has to drive home the desirability of escaping). It balances fun, thrills, and entertainment with some more hard-hitting and grim moments well, being a mass-appeal action-packed epic that also manages to touch upon the grimness of World War II, balancing these two extremes without ever feeling tonally wonky or otherwise uneven.

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NEXT: The Best Arthouse War Movies, Ranked