If you hear about a movie that’s a few hours long, and hear it get called an epic, you might expect it to be a bit of a slog. If not a slog, you could at least feel a little intimidated, or depending on your attention span, potentially be aware that you’ll need to focus and drink some extra coffee or something. Epics can be both long and slow, but that’s not always a bad thing.
Especially looking at the classics, you do get a bunch that are patiently paced by today’s standards. But there are a couple of old-school ones, and a fair few more recent epics, that actually move rather fast pacing-wise. All the following are at least 2.5 hours, feel sufficiently ambitious and grand in scale to count as epics, and move along at a quicker pace than most movies of their length/genre.
10
‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)
For better or worse, Oppenheimer sometimes feels like watching an eight or nine-hour-long miniseries on fast-forward, with a whole season’s worth of stuff crammed into a runtime that’s only one minute over three hours all up. It covers a great deal of time, a huge amount of weighty thematic content, and has so many different characters throughout, all in service of telling a huge and historically significant story.
Part of the reason it works and is coherent is that almost every role is played by a recognizable actor, so even if you don’t remember every character’s name or title, you can be like, “Hey, it’s the Florence Pugh character,” or “the Matt Damon character,” or “the Rami Malek character” and kind of keep up. It’s still breathless, and the non-chronological storytelling also contributes to it passing by in a flash (not of the nuclear variety, thankfully), since Oppenheimer is always jumping around and keen to move on to a new scene what feels like every minute or two.
9
‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ (1963)
You would hope a movie that called itself It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World would deliver something zany and breathless, and that is indeed what you get here, because the film’s an epic-length slapstick comedy and action/adventure movie. It’s about a large group of largely selfish people all finding out, at the same time, about an apparent buried fortune, and so they all set off on a cutthroat race across many miles to get there and dig it up before anyone else.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is always racing forward, like its characters, and if you like old-fashioned slapstick chaos, you’ll probably have a blast.
There’s a big cast, huge set pieces, and a plot that doesn’t really slow down until the ultimate end of the line is reached. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is always racing forward, like its characters, and though some might feel the entire thing is overlong (there are different cuts of this film, with at least one exceeding three hours), if you like old-fashioned slapstick chaos, you’ll probably have a blast.
8
‘Babylon’ (2022)
Starting with a bang that might be a bit much for some, Babylon does indeed let you know what you’re in for early on. Once you survive an elephant pooping all over the camera about one or two minutes in, you might be okay with all the depravity and chaos that follows, or maybe not. There’s a party sequence that would be the first act in most movies, but in Babylon, it’s probably only about one-sixth of the movie, if that.
That’s because Babylon is well over three hours long, and justifies that runtime (yes, really) by covering a lengthy period of time while also being about excess and a hectic kind of life that involves getting chewed up and spat out by the film industry. It’s overflowing with ideas, things it wants to say, and spectacle, and if you’re willing to go along for the ride, few movies of a comparable size in recent years have proven quite so thrilling.
7
‘Magnolia’ (1999)
It’s not a popular pick for the title of “best Paul Thomas Anderson movie,” but Magnolia honestly might deserve the crown. It’s got so much going for it, like a lot of the epics being mentioned here, but it stands out for having the everything-ness of it all actually feel rather mundane, or mostly ordinary. Ending aside, maybe. If you know, you know.
Magnolia is a day-in-the-life kind of thing, just for a wide variety of characters, so like a day in the lives. And everyone’s having an eventful day, but not in a cinematic manner. Like, no individual story would be able to sustain a feature-length movie on its own, though taken together, and when they’re all cut between, they add up to something remarkable. It’s also hard to fault the quality of the acting here, too, with the performances being a massive reason why Magnolia is so continually compelling.
6
‘The Irishman’ (2019)
Some might say that The Irishman feels slow compared to Goodfellas, and sure, Goodfellas has more energy and noticeable style, all the while feeling a good deal faster because it’s about an hour shorter. It’s not quite an epic though, while The Irishman is, and truly, the amount of ground The Irishman covers, it’s honestly not nearly as different pacing-wise, compared to Goodfellas or other Martin Scorsese crime films, as certain detractors may make you believe.
There is a sense of age and bleakness here that makes The Irishman not exactly fun, yet it moves well with how much time it spans, how many character interactions and dynamics it explores, and how much it ultimately has to say on a thematic front. It’s a mature and impeccably put-together gangster film, or like a cinematic funeral for the gangster genre, as Scorsese understood (and arguably redefined) it. Restrained and thought-provoking? Sure. But slow? Nah. Not at all.
5
‘RRR’ (2022)
RRR rewrites history, or maybe remixes it, more accurately. There are two revolutionary figures who really existed, but didn’t actually team up in real life to battle oppressive forces in India during the 1920s. But that’s what they do in RRR, and it’s pretty awesome, with the storytelling being broad but hard not to get emotionally involved with, since the heroes are compelling and the villains are almost cartoonishly evil.
Again, in a way that works. It feels cool and effortless rather than overly simplistic or silly in a bad sort of way. It helps that RRR has some of the best action set pieces of the decade so far, and the way it keeps escalating and upping the stakes throughout ensures the whole thing stays immensely entertaining across a considerable (but surprisingly effortless to get through) runtime of 185 minutes.
4
‘Gladiator’ (2000)
Speaking of exciting action-packed epics that aren’t necessarily too concerned with historical accuracy, here’s Gladiator, which has some historical figures playing a part in the narrative, but an ultimately fictional protagonist. He’s a general in the Roman Army who’s betrayed early on, and then becomes a slave/gladiator, at which point, he decides to dedicate whatever life he has left to getting revenge on the man who wronged him.
It’s on the shorter side of things, as far as epics go, being a little over 2.5 hours, so that does inevitably help keep it going at a fairly quick rate pacing-wise. It’s also easy to be invested in what’s happening throughout Gladiator, with the drama-heavy side of things making the action more engaging and cathartic, with the whole movie concluding on an undeniable high, too.
3
‘Sholay’ (1975)
If you liked RRR and found it to be admirably wild and entertaining, then the older – but still relentlessly entertaining – Sholay is easy to recommend. It’s a legendary and well-known film in India, but it doesn’t seem to get discussed nearly as often in English-speaking circles, or certainly not to the same extent as other immense epic movies that are more than half a century old, yet still hold up.
The maximalism of Sholay is such that it’s still gonzo and engaging, even with it being multiple decades old. Also, on top of having a good deal of action, it’s something of a musical, and you could also classify it as a Western, plus it dips its toes into a whole bunch of other genres throughout, too. It has the same kind of blockbuster “must appeal to everyone” approach that James Cameron films often have, but even then, it’s arguably more ambitious than anything Cameron’s directed in terms of trying to fit into a particularly high number of genres all at once.
2
‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ (2003)
As the third film in a remarkable trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King does get to have the most exciting stuff to depict, but in a way that feels natural. All the huge battle sequences and emotional moments were built up to remarkably well here, and so it’s a film that gets to deliver payoff after payoff, and watching it – after also getting through the other two movies – is a remarkably thrilling and moving experience.
Maybe it gets to cheat a little bit, because it doesn’t have to do what other epics not part of trilogies have to do. You know, setting things up, starting small and getting bigger, and achieving more of a balance; all that stuff. Still, some highly anticipated third installments in trilogies have face-planted on the finish line before, so The Return of the King very much not doing that is still worth celebrating.
1
‘Kill Bill’ (2003–2004)
The first volume of Kill Bill came out the same year as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and this is another example of a movie kind of getting to cheat its way into a high spot ranking-wise, since it’s an epic when you take both volumes together. Either film on its own is certainly ambitious, but not long enough to be an epic in the traditional sense.
Still, if you watch this as “The Whole Bloody Affair,” it does have to keep its rather simple revenge story going (while staying interesting) for about four hours, and it does so remarkably well. It also does so while having one volume that’s hyperactive and heavy on action, and then another volume that’s a bit more restrained and patiently paced, yet still capable of moving efficiently and well, not to mention being dialogue-heavy while never feeling boring.
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