There are big movies and then these movies, films that pack in scope, scale,
and spectacle to create an experience that feels truly massive.
So enormous we couldn't even fit ten on this list.
These are our picks for the top five best historical epics of all time.
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For this list we're taking it era by era.
So starting at the beginning, let's take a look at ancient times.
And the most epic recreations of classical antiquity take us to places like Egypt
to films like Cleopatra with it's humongous sets,
and the ten commandments with its revolutionary VFX.
And then to Greece and films like the strangely hammy Troy and
these strangely not hammy Jason and the Argonauts.
And then Rome in a million different films, the best of which includes
Scorsese's biblical The Last Temptation of Christ, Kubrick's iconic Spartacus,
one of the first true epics of all time, Cabiria, and the all mighty Ben-Hur.
The Arabian Peninsula in The Message and
even a little bit to Babylon in the partially epic Intolerance.
But it's actually China where we find our most extravagant of ancient yarns.
Gorgeously colored and often list-topping hero,
along with Yimou Zhang's somehow even more colorful Curse of the Golden Flower,
vastly less colorful Shadow, and the peculiarly Matt Damon led The Great Wall.
But it's another director, John Woo,
who snags this spot with his enormous two-parter Red Cliff.
(Foreign) >> If you weren't looking you may have
missed the China has entered a new era of epic filmmaking,
cranking out bigger and more spectacular takes on their country's history
just about as fast as America turns out Marvel movies.
And none is quite as spectacular as Red Cliff, Parts I and II,
which mark jJohn Woo's return to his home country after a long stint in Hollywood.
The film recounts the Battle of Red Cliffs in the beginning of China's Three Kingdoms
period that is so ensconced in legend and lore.
The country's most expensive film ever at the time of its making,
Red Cliff is full to the brim with fantastic actors in awesome roles,
exciting strategy, and counter strategy.
Culminating in a final 40 minute showdown that starts out somewhere between a watery
Helm's Deep in the Battle of Blackwater and ends in an all out melee.
It is epic in absolutely every possible sense of the term and a fantastic
way to jump on board with some of the most exciting contemporary epic cinema.
Next up, we're fast forwarding to the Middle Ages to see how the idea of an epic
has changed, and it's pretty much the same but more in Northern Europe now.
You can get your fix on rebellion in Braveheart and
the Crusades and Kingdom of Heaven and El Cid.
A little further East,
you get the absolutely incredible Czech film Marketa Lazarova and the rare,
mostly non-violent, epic Andri Rublev, that's more about the casting of a bell.
Of course, if bells aren't for you,
you can get huge battles in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky.
We get some incredible stories out of India.
This era is bests are probably Jodha Akbar and Mughal E-Azem,
especially if you like your epics brightly colored, badass, and filled with song.
And we even start to see some epic set in the Americas, namely Apocalypto.
But for our second slot,
our choice finds us in Japan with the master of the Jidaigeki,
none other than Akira Kurosawa whose Seven Samurai is unparalleled, but
almost too small to be called an epic when compared to his later films, Kagemusha and
our number four pick, Ran.
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>> A Samurai adaptation of Shakespeare,
and not Kurosawa's first, Ran retells the story of King Lear in feudal Japan as an
aging ruler abdicates, leaving his three sons to do battle for his throne, and how.
Ran has some of the biggest, boldest,
no BS battlefield scenes without the obscurity of cuts or camera tricks or CGI.
It's all right there in a wide shot right in front of you.
Watching it, we're frankly not entirely sure Kurosawa didn't just stage an actual
war and film it.
Shot near the end of his career,
Ran is the culmination of years of the very best in Samurai filmmaking.
Extended to the grandest scale money could afford, gorgeously photographed,
brilliantly staged, and ambitious as hell.
The only thing higher than our praise for Ran are Lady Kaede's eyebrows.
Moving right along to the early modern period,
epics start to look a little different in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Less swords, more powder of the gun and wig varieties.
America gives us Western epics like Last of the Mohicans, The Alamo, How
the West Was Won, and Heaven's Gate, and southern epics like Gone With the Wind.
We get Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in China and Zulu in Africa.
But it's in Europe this time that we find our pick,
alongside such strong entires as Napoleon and The Charge of the Light Brigade,
it's Bondarchuk's War and Peace that wins the day this time.
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>> Seven hours over four parts,
shot over five years with more money than any other Soviet project before it,
Sergei Bondarchu's behemoth adaptation is every bit a match for
its notoriously weighty source material.
There is a sequence within it, the Battle of Borodino, that took two years to film,
12,000 extras, 200 operational cannons, gave the director one of the two heart
attacks he suffered while shooting this monster, and
is today still the largest battle scene ever shot.
But to measure War and Peace in numbers like that does it a disservice.
Its generous length provides it latitude to be both big and small,
adapting Tolstoy at scales both imperial and personal, and
it extends this intimacy over nearly 300 actual characters.
It's utterly unprecedented, would still be one of the finer films ever shot if it
didn't stretch to the horizon, and is well worth taking the time to fully devour.
(Sound) For our last two stops, we arrive in the 20th century,
which we'll split roughly down the middle between its two great wars.
And many of those films set in the first half of the century focused on Europe
during the first one, The Big Parade, A Very Long Engagement,
and especially All Quiet on the Western Front.
Although last year's 1917 has surely established itself
right up there with the best of it.
But there was other history to cover too,
the Russian Revolution in Reds, Battleship Potemkin, and Doctor Zhivago.
The Indian revolution in Gandhi, a big boat that didn't float so good in Titanic,
the Wsche Incident in Seediq Bale, the Nanjing massacre in the Flowers of War,
and a whole bunch of American mob history in Once Upon a Time in America.
But it was in Arabia where a man named Lawrence took part in one of
the World War's lesser known conflicts to bigger effect,
landing here at the top of this slot for our number two pick.
>> Lawrence, only two kinds of creature get fond of the desert, Bedouins and
gods, and you're neither.
Take it from me, for ordinary men it's a burning, fiery furnace.
>> No, Dryden, it's going to be fun.
>> It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun.
>> When we think epic film we think of CinemaScope live screenshots of vast
expanses dotted with figures so small they might be miniatures.
And there is no movie that has ever used the highly rectangular frame quite like
David Lean managed in Lawrence of Arabia.
Truly massive in sight and sound, less we forget about the Maurice Jarre score,
it is impossible to watch this film on a big screen and
not feel the endless extent of the barren desert stretching out before you and
wrapping around you until you're practically in it.
It's just so massive and it fits the character so well, always larger than life
in everything he did, this is truly a tale made for the big screen.
(Sound) And finally we arrived at the last half of the 20th century,
a period of time that gave us World War II most cinematically rendered in
the Thin Red Line, the Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalingrad,
The Longest Day, Patton, Dunkirk, and obviously Saving Private Ryan.
There's the Sino-Japanese War best shown in City of Life and
Death and the end of the Chinese Imperial line in The Last Emperor.
But our last slot belongs to a depiction of the Vietnam War,
the scope of which we see best dramatized in Platoon and Full Metal Jacket,
but never quite spectacularly as our final pick, Apocalypse Now.
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Vietnam, with all its guerrilla jungle warfare,
is a strange conflict to render broadly.
And amidst Apocalypse Now's increasingly surreal onset of psychosis,
it's easy to forget how massive the film set pieces really are.
But they were destroying whole villages, napalming giant swaths of jungle for real,
dispatching entire squadrons of helicopters and
spanning bridges in conflict.
Hell, even the troops entertainment has a certain epicness to it.
It makes the departure from civilization and descent into madness
all the more impactful for the scope of the chaos we leave behind and trade in for
this different kind of insanity.
It's gorgeous, haunting, and a genuine masterpiece,
which is why it's our pick for one of the best epic films of all time.
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So what do you think?
Disagree with any of our picks?
Did we leave out any of your favorite epics?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.
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