Only 3 Epic Movies Are Better Than ‘Lawrence of Arabia’

Epic movies don’t get a whole lot better than Lawrence of Arabia, and neither do movies generally speaking, really. It’s a difficult one to talk about because all the things it does, it does incredibly well, so reviewing or analyzing Lawrence of Arabia really just feels like listing off the things that you can find in almost any movie. There is acting in Lawrence of Arabia, and it’s fantastic. There is cinematography in Lawrence of Arabia, and it is beautiful. There is music in Lawrence of Arabia, and it is excellent. See where it goes? It goes nowhere. So, what’s more interesting is looking at the epic genre specifically, and playing a bit of a game that involves asking the question of whether any other film of a similar scope/scale/runtime not only equals Lawrence of Arabia, but arguably surpasses it. They said it couldn’t be done, and maybe they were right. But there is going to be an attempt here, regardless.

Sorry in advance for causing potential outrage. What’s best to remember here is that four pretty much perfect movies are being juggled here at once, and Lawrence of Arabia is one of those airborne balls. It’s impressive that those other balls are there, though, and are being thrown around at the same time, all the while being just as deserving of one’s attention as the, uh, Lawrence of Arabia ball. Does this make sense? It doesn’t really, does it? Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe this is a particularly risky endeavor, but anyway, enough with delaying the inevitable. These epics are all at least as amazing as Lawrence of Arabia, and perhaps even ever so slightly better (all of them 10/10s, but some potentially more 10-worthy than others).

3

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

Image via Paramount Pictures

10 years on from Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather did for crime/gangster epics what that movie did for war epics. Also, both won Best Picture at the Oscars, and proved very deserving of that award for their respective years. With The Godfather, you have what’s essentially the opening act of an eventual three-part tragedy, all of those parts about the Corleone crime family, with the first movie being arguably the most perfect. The Godfather Part II does complicate things a little, though. In some ways, it might be even better than The Godfather, or at least it can be called more of an epic, since it is longer overall and covers a greater span of time, thanks to its use of flashbacks throughout. But The Godfather (1972) is still very much an epic, and certainly isn’t lacking, by any means, when it comes to ambition. It juggles quite a few different characters and narrative threads, all while seamlessly transferring main character status from Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) to his son, Michael (Al Pacino), in a way that feels organic, and it makes sense that later films, then, are focused on Michael and his downfall, in contrast to how Vito rose beyond the status (or lack thereof) he had earlier in his life.

Also, similarly to Lawrence of Arabia, you’re pretty much overwhelmed with things to praise, when it comes to The Godfather, and it’s another instance of a film where just about everything is indeed praiseworthy. When it comes to crowning the best crime movie of the 1970s, it usually boils down to either The Godfather or The Godfather Part II, and there are only a handful of gangster movies made since 1972/1974 that could be considered on the same level. And few of them are as epic in scope as The Godfather and its sequel (see the excellent Goodfellas, for example, which is an ambitious and very confident film, but not really an epic in the conventional sense). You can’t go wrong with anything here, in this first Godfather movie, and though it’s a different sort of epic to Lawrence of Arabia, if you want to compare them anyway, The Godfather might well be a tad better.

2

‘War and Peace’ (1965)

It should be stressed that this is a different War and Peace from the English-language version that starred Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, and came out in 1956. That one was certainly an epic, with a runtime of almost 3.5 hours, but it was dwarfed by the War and Peace adaptation from about a decade later, which is technically a four-part film with a combined runtime of just over seven hours. That might sound excessive until you remember how long War and Peace (the novel by Leo Tolstoy) is, and if anything, condensing it all to just seven hours is quite the screenwriting achievement. It naturally can’t adapt everything, but you do get a lot here, with the backdrop being the Napoleonic Wars, and the story centering on a handful of characters who have their lives changed by said conflict. You get a bit of war, and a bit of peace (well, the peace side of things is only comparatively peaceful, since there’s quite a bit of romantic and social turmoil explored throughout).

There might not be any other films that feel as big as War and Peace does, and that’s the reason it’s here. If it didn’t have a literal unlimited budget, then it at least looked as though it might’ve, especially when you get to the massive battle sequences and take in just how many extras were used throughout. How anything was even coordinated at such a scale is mind-boggling, and then even when there aren’t battle sequences being captured, so many other scenes go way grander in scope than you might expect (like all the lavish ball scenes). Sergei Bondarchuk directed this mammoth film while also being one of the stars (playing Count Pierre Bezukhov), so that’s a massive achievement worth admiring, too. Life is short, yes, and the idea of watching a seven-hour movie might sound daunting, but it really is finding the time for something like War and Peace, as there is nothing else like it (within the epic genre or otherwise) out there, really.

1

‘Seven Samurai’ (1954)

Image via Toho

You should watch more than one samurai movie, but if it really only can be one, for whatever reason, it’s good to go with Seven Samurai. There are probably 700 things about this movie that are great, but if you want just seven, to be cute and stuff, how about: (1) it’s well-paced, (2) it’s epic but also personal, (3) the stakes are always high, (4) the characters are memorable, (5) the acting’s phenomenal, (6) the climax is incredible, and (7) it’s massively influential. Its influence becomes obvious when you watch it, especially if you’re already familiar with a good many action movies made since 1954, since Seven Samurai told a big story and told it perfectly, all the while fully defining the ideal structure for an action movie made on such a scale. The premise here involves townspeople hiring warriors to defend their town from an incoming bandit attack, and across the three acts, you have the formation of a team, then the planning of a battle, and then, finally, the battle/showdown itself.

It all sounds quite simple when you lay it out like that, and in a narrative sense, Seven Samurai is kind of straightforward, or at least easy to label as approachable/efficient. But telling a story, even a simple one, with such clarity is no easy task, and Seven Samurai’s plot only feels familiar nowadays, in the first place, because of all the movies that were influenced by Seven Samurai. It’s also far from the only masterpiece Akira Kurosawa ever directed, and if you’re talking epics, then Ran (1985) is almost just as good, but Seven Samurai does remain his most well-known, acclaimed, and influential film for good reason. Actually, for many reasons. At least seven, maybe as many as 700. It’s not 700 minutes long, but it is lengthy, at about 207 minutes, and none of them are wasted. There’s a lot that can be learned from the writing and filmmaking on offer here, but there’s also so much to just be entertained by, with this being remarkably engrossing for a movie that, at the time of writing, isn’t actually far off from being three-quarters of a century old (essentially timeless stuff, in other words).