As film critics and Internet users do their annual retrospective on the films released in the last year, I’ve noticed a common theme: complaint about runtimes. There seems to be a consensus that many movies these days are entirely too long (Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon).
But for stories that are epic in scale, a lengthy runtime comes with the territory. After all, you wouldn’t try to pare The Godfather down to a tight ninety minutes.
But the question then becomes, why so many epics films this year?
Simple answer: we live in epic times.
Look at the news. Look at the state of the world. We live in a moment that requires us to plumb the depths of our humanity simply to get through any given day. It only makes sense that the stories produced by our culture would echo such monumental stakes for our world, our society, our collective sense of humanity.
joshua chamberlain 