Top 10 Epic Action Movies: Ranked

There’s something irresistibly fun and exciting about a good action movie. No matter their taste in films, everyone always craves a properly exhilarating, action-packed adventure at least every once in a while. Smaller-scale action movies are entertaining enough, sure, but there’s nothing quite like a massive action epic. There are many things that can make a movie fit into that category; a prolonged runtime, a gargantuan tale centered on a quasi-mythical hero, or set pieces so grand that they must be seen to be believed.

There are many films that fit that bill. From modern ones, like the demented Mad Max: Fury Road, to old foreign classics, like the highly-acclaimed Seven Samurai. The best action epics are some of the most exciting, memorable, and impactful gems that have ever graced cinema. They can be daunting watches, but they’re always fully worth the time commitment.

He was once an up-and-coming British indie director, but nowadays, Christopher Nolan is the king of modern high-quality Hollywood blockbusters. He has made some of the best epic movies of the 21st century, and his best action epic is the dream-hopping Inception. It’s about a thief who steals corporate secrets through the use of technology that allows him to enter people’s dreams. When he’s given the task of implanting an idea into the mind of a wealthy magnate, his tragic past puts the mission and his team at risk.

Inception may not be one of Nolan’s most emotional works, but it’s certainly one of the most creative and exciting. Full of massive set pieces that only a mind like Nolan’s could have possibly devised, the film is bound to keep a tight grip on viewers’ attention for the entirety of its 2-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Hayao Miyazaki, master of anime cinema and one of Japan’s most talented filmmakers, has a filmography filled to the brim with must-see gems. One of his best is Princess Mononoke, a low fantasy epic about a warrior who sets out on a journey to find the cure for a curse. He thus finds himself caught in the middle of a war between the forest gods and a mining colony.

Miyazaki specializes in making films that are more mature than your average Hollywood animated film, while still very much being family-friendly. Princess Mononoke is different. Its action scenes are as exciting as they are surprisingly violent for a Ghibli movie, helping its epic tone feel larger-than-life. This way, the story’s exploration of themes of progress and humans’ conflict with nature becomes all the more potent.

The highest-grossing director in India’s history, S.S. Rajamouli is nothing short of an icon. His latest work is RRR, a mythical action film that takes inspiration from the lives of Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, two real Indian revolutionaries. The story is about a fearless warrior on a dangerous mission, who comes face-to-face with a ruthless cop serving British forces.

RRR proves that not all historical epics need to be based on a true story. Though it uses the characters of these two Indian revolutionaries, the story that it places them in is entirely fictitious and delightfully creative. It’s an epic saga through and through, and it has something for pretty much everyone. Mind-blowing action scenes? Check. A romance and a bromance? Check. A sudden song-and-dance number that no viewer will soon forget? Definitely check.

Though the 1968 original Planet of the Apes is a staple of the sci-fi genre, the franchise that it spawned was never particularly extraordinary — until the 2010s, when the franchise was rebooted in the form of one of the best movie trilogies of the 21st century. The conclusion of said trilogy turned out to be the single best installment in the whole series: War for the Planet of the Apes, where Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts after the apes suffer unimaginable losses at the hands of the humans.

It’s nothing short of astonishing that a chimpanzee can be as nuanced, fascinating, and sympathetic a protagonist as Caesar, in no small measure thanks to Andy Serkis‘s masterful motion-capture performance. War for the Planet of the Apes is an epic conclusion to this nearly flawless trilogy, while never losing the intimate and surprisingly human tone that made the series so special in the first place.

Nowadays, the Star Wars franchise needs no introduction, seeing as it’s arguably the biggest transmedia franchise in history. As such, for younger fans, it’s hard to believe that it all began with a fully original film directed by rising talent George Lucas back in 1977. Star Wars, now known as Episode IV — A New Hope, is a classic Hero’s Journey tale centered on Luke Skywalker, a young farmer who sets out on an adventure to destroy the tyrannical Empire’s world-destroying weapon and save the galaxy.

A New Hope is full of memorable characters, thrilling sci-fi set pieces, and a tone worthy of a classic epic opera, making it easy to call this one of the best epic movies of all time, period. The film has earned its reputation as one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time for plenty of good reasons. This is about as fun as movies can ever hope to get.

What started out as a triumph of shoestring-budget filmmaking in Australia in the form of George Miller‘s Mad Max, 36 years later turned into the director’s demented action epic dream come true. Mad Max: Fury Road finds the titular character helping Imperator Furiosa look for her estranged homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners.

One of the best desert adventure movies of all time, Fury Road is 2 hours of non-stop thrills full of idiosyncratic world-building, badass characters, and action scenes the likes of which fans of the genre had never seen before. The runtime may not make the film sound like an epic, but with set pieces this colossal and pacing this relentless, it’s hard to call it anything but an epic.

Who says that action movies can’t be slow-burns? In 1986, Michael Mann proved that they absolutely could. He did so with Heat, one of the most acclaimed crime dramas ever made. Starring Al Pacino as LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna and Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley, the leader of a group of high-end professional thieves, the film intertwines the stories of these two characters as they clash after a heist gone slightly wrong.

Pacino and De Niro are incredible in Heat, carrying the narrative and emotional weight of this surprisingly larger-than-life story on their shoulders effortlessly. Though the film offers one of the best shootout scenes ever filmed, it’s not exactly an action-packed thriller. Instead, its epic feel comes from the profound way in which it dives into these characters and the thought-provoking themes they represent.

When it comes to Japanese filmmakers, there is perhaps no one as influential, iconic, and worthy of praise as the legendary Akira Kurosawa. Throughout his long-running career, he made a surprising number of movies that deserve to be called masterpieces. But it’s universally agreed that his best work is Seven Samurai, about a village oppressed by raiders who recruit seven warriors to defend them.

The movie’s iconic premise has been imitated and paid homage to numerous times in movies and television, but there will never be a film that’s able to parallel the power of Seven Samurai as a whole. Thanks to its complex and nuanced characters, it’s endearing emotional core, and its variety of masterfully crafted set pieces sprinkled throughout a grand 3-hour runtime, it’s one of the best historical epics of all time.

A New Hope may have broken new ground in the sci-fi subgenre of the epic space opera, but it was Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back that really cemented the franchise’s legacy as the hyper-acclaimed pillar of pop culture that it’s remembered as today. One of the best sequels of all time, The Empire Strikes Back finds Luke beginning his Jedi training with Master Yoda while Darth Vader pursues his friends across the galaxy.

The movie is far bigger, darker, more mature, and more exciting than its predecessor, building on the foundations of the world and story that it laid off. It has not just one, but numerous of the most instantly recognizable moments in the genre’s history, all glued together by action scenes that are dripping with energy and creativity.

Every generation has that one movie that instantly comes to mind when they think of the word “epic”. In the case of today’s generation, that personification of epicness happens to be three films. Of course, it’s Peter Jackson‘s legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy, about a team of heroes who must journey across Middle-earth to destroy the One Ring, an evil tyrant’s secret weapon to take over the land.

Fellowship of the Ring, which serves as a beautiful and moving introduction to this world and its characters; The Two Towers, which shoots the stakes into the stratosphere; and Return of the King, which still reigns supreme among Best Picture Oscar-winning epic films. There have never been more epic action films than these icons of the fantasy genre, which still thrill and rouse today as much as they did back at the turn of the century.

NEXT:The Best Epic Animated Movies, Ranked