We like 'em BIG. Lavish sets, foreign locations, thousands of extras, and millions of dollars. In other words, we love the epics. Epic movies have a knack for escaping the boundaries of the movie screen, making every nuance feel important.

Many film critics have claimed that Hollywood no longer knows how to make a good epic (with the possible exception of Titanic). This may be true, but it doesn't mean that we have to forget the classics. So enjoy these 5 all-time greatest epics.

1. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Joseph Conrad's book Heart of Darkness was set in the Belgian Congo, yet when Francis Ford Coppola made this film adaptation, he switched the setting to Viet Nam. Although the geographic and temporal settings are widely disparate, the same themes prevail: namely, that civilization is only a hair's breadth away from total, unadulterated chaos. And the only thing keeping the two apart is a man called Kurtz.

In this case, Kurtz is the terrifying figure of Marlon Brando - terrifying mainly because he outweighs his Godfather self by about 400 pounds. Okay, not that much, but enough to give the native cannibals some food for thought. Martin Sheen plays a U.S. soldier given the mission to "terminate with extreme prejudice" Colonel Kurtz, a renegade U.S. officer. The story follows Sheen's progress on a PT boat down a river into the heart of the jungle, and his fraying sense of civilization along the way. The film culminates in the confrontation of Sheen and Brando at Brando's outpost, of which he is de facto king.

Perhaps more gripping than the narrative of the film is the story of the film itself. Coppola had tremendous difficulty finishing this movie, stopping several times to raise additional money before returning to Asia to shoot. A typhoon destroyed the sets, the 6-week production schedule ended up taking 16 months, and Coppola ended up losing 100 pounds due to all the stress. Furthermore, Brando continually showed up drunk and refused to read his lines, and Sheen had a heart attack mid-filming. Just another typical movie shoot, eh?

Notes:

  • Nominated for 8 Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Director, and Supporting Actor)

  • Won 2 Academy Awards: Best Cinematography and Sound

  • A 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne played a supporting role

  • Placed #28 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List

2. BEN-HUR (1959)

For some reason, the 50s were fertile ground for grand Roman epics; in back-to-back years, Hollywood produced Ben-Hur and Spartacus. We are the lucky beneficiaries of this cinematic hubris, since it would likely be too expensive - even for James Cameron - to assemble one of these leviathans today. Both of these classics feature enormous sweeping scenes with thousands of extras and miles of "ancient" landscape. Indeed, the chariot sequence from Ben-Hur is considered one of the finest achievements in film history. You will be amazed at how good this forty-year-old segment still looks today.

Ben Hur is an epic tale of two boyhood friends - one a Judean Jew, the other a Roman noble - who grow to be leaders of their hostile sides. After the Roman, who has newly been appointed Tribune to Judea, crushes his friend's family to prove his bad-assed-ness, people get angry. Charlton Heston - the most amazing voice this side of Darth Vader - plays Judah Ben-Hur, sentenced to years of hellish torment as a rower aboard a Roman galley. Needless to say, he's a little bitter. The famed chariot scene is the redemptive sequence in which Judah gets medieval. You'll enjoy it.

This movie takes the ancient biblical struggles between Jews and Romans and updates it with echoes of WWII, still relatively fresh in the minds of those who created this film. This film is the first Hollywood blockbuster, costing a record $15,000,000 to create and taking 6 years to plan; it still plays wonderfully and you'll see why your parents get misty when they hear about it.

Notes:

  • Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including Best Picture

  • Won 11 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Art/Set Direction, Costumes, Visual Effects, Film Editing, Score, and Sound. It only lost the Best Screenplay Oscar. Damn!

  • Placed #72 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List

3. BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

Even before Pleasantville came out, we all sort of assumed that the fifties were a cozy, feel-good decade: cheery folk basking in that post-apocalyptic glow. Yet Bridge on the River Kwai is decidedly un-fifties in its outlook. This film exudes the gritty realism of the benchmark war movies that cropped up in the following decades like Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and most recently, Saving Private Ryan. Kwai doesn't have the same incessant carnage (what does?), but it was one of the first films to wipe the romantic sheen off of World War II. War movies before Kwai were much like Casablanca - a great film, to be sure, but one that gives the impression that the War involved little more than flirtations in romantically foreign locales. People drop like flies in Kwai because it is the story of British prisoners of war who were forced to build a railroad from Burma to Malaysia through malaria-infested jungles in brutal heat. Even gin & tonic couldn't save the Brits from this hell.

The crux of this film is the psychological combat between the highest ranking British officer in the POW camp, Nicholson (Alec Guiness), and the Japanese camp commander, Saito. The two men struggle over who will be forced to work on the railroad and how they will build a vital bridge. Nicholson, being the prisoner, spends some unpleasant time in a metal box, baking in the tropical sun.

The most amazing part of the film, however, takes place during the last 20 minutes. The gruesome heartlessness of war had never been depicted so realistically until this film hit the theaters. By the time you reach the end, you're not sure whether you're supposed to cheer or cry . . . was it all worth it?

Notes:

  • Nominated for 8 Academy Awards

  • Won 7 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Screenplay, Cinematography, and Film Editing

  • Placed #13 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List

4. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Citizen Kane: Orson Welles had never made a movie before this one, he was 25 when he made it, and it revolutionized cinema. Filmed in the middle of World War II, this masterpiece is the product of an amazing crew that was given free reign by the studio. The result is what pretty much everybody believes to be one of the finest films ever made.

When Welles arrived in Hollywood, he had been a shining star in radio. Thus, he had a highly tuned sense of sound that, when married to the astounding cinematography, results in a sensory feast. His greatest innovation in this film, however, was a complex narrative structure that distorts time by using flashbacks and other temporally interwoven sequences, before Quentin Tarantino was even born. Previously, films were typically plotted out in strict temporal linearity, but Citizen Kane begins with the obituary of the great publisher Kane and works backward to uncover his rise to power. Sure, no big deal now, but you try being the first person ever to do it.

The story of the film is based on the lives of powerful press titans of the time, such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Kane is a larger-than-life figure whose megalomania catapults him to power before casting him into ignominious solitude. This epic plot befits a film of such visual and narrative innovation. Much of the movie may appear unremarkable to the modern viewer, but practically everything contemporary about film was invented in this one. The amazing use of chiaroscuro and perspective all possess narrative relevance: who is in the dark and who are lighted indicate the moral valences of those characters. See Citizen Kane to see where it all began.

Notes:

  • Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor . . . all for Mr. Welles.

  • Won 1 Academy Award: Best Screenplay

  • Placed #1 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List

5. GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

Gone With the Wind is filled with interesting characters, lavish settings, groundbreaking cinematography, and beautiful music. And yet, we think that the key to this film can be found in one person: Scarlett O'Hara.

Scarlett O'Hara is a bitch. She's spoiled, she uses her sexuality to connive men into doing her bidding, and she doesn't think twice about marrying a man for the sole reason of making another man jealous. And yet, Scarlett is the perfect anti-hero, saying and doing exactly the opposite of everyone else during the 1860s.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, Gone With the Wind takes place in the South before, during, and after the Civil War. Scarlett O'Hara (played by Vivien Leigh) lives on a massive plantation named Tara, and the Confederacy is just on the brink of going to war with the Yankees. Scarlett, however, couldn't care less about the war; she's much more interested in playing with men's emotions and choosing her own life. She eventually meets rakish war profiteer Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), and they naturally engage in a love-hate relationship full of witty insults.

The movie progresses along like the 4-hour soap opera that it is. Scarlett escapes the burning of Atlanta, survives the destruction of Tara, starts her own business, loses husbands . . . yet as she so famously points out, no matter how much tragedy she endures, "tomorrow is another day." In short, Scarlett is a survivor, and that's what we like about her.

Notes:

  • Made more money than any other film until The Sound of Music; some claim that it has sold more tickets than any other movie ever

  • Three directors worked on this film, all at different times

  • Nominated for 13 Academy Awards

  • Won 8 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actress (Leigh), Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel), Screenplay, Editing, Art Direction, Cinematography (it also won 2 special Academy Awards for its use of color, and its use of "coordinated equipment")

  • Hattie McDaniels Academy Award was the first ever to go to an African American

  • Placed #4 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List