The Mahabharata      Director: Peter Brook Cert: GGenre: DramaStarring: Starring Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Andrzej Seweryn, Georges Corraface, Mallika Sarabhai, Miriam Goldschmidt, Jeffrey Kissoon, Sotigui Kouyaté, Ciarán Hinds, Erika AlexanderRunning Time: 5 hrs 32 minsPeter Brook’s The Mahabharata was an audacious attempt to compress one of the world’s vastest stories into a movie shape. Its very existence is semi-miraculous.The ancient Sanskrit epic, roughly twice the length of the Bible and the combined works of Shakespeare, comprises dynastic rivalry, divine intervention, war and questions of moral responsibility over many generations. Brook and the writer Jean-Claude Carrière reduced that enormous universe to a nine-hour French stage production in 1985, and then cleverly condensed it to a three-hour 1989 film, made in the intimate, suggestive style of the late Derek Jarman’s historical epics, Caravaggio and Edward II. This new version incorporates material from the six-hour version concurrently shot for TV. It’s a remarkable runtime for a film budgeted at an estimated $5 million.We do get arrows, but The Mahabharata seldom resembles a conventional swords-and-sandals epic. This is an extraordinary staging, set against a backdrop that feels like negotiating a labyrinthine cave. There are no monumental armies or CGI bells and whistles. Good, evil, the murk in between, and storytelling do the heavy lifting. The audience is asked to complete the world as participants. But the imaginative material makes it easy.At its heart is a classic family catastrophe cut from the same mythological cloth as The Brown Bull of Coole or the Hatfield-McCoy feud. The Pandavas and their cousins, the Kauravas, struggle for power until political rivalry becomes annihilating conflict. Krishna offers counsel, but not easy moral certainty. There are no winners here, an ambiguity that Brooks embraces. His Mahabharata is less concerned with black hats versus white hats than with human beings discovering how ideas can become weaponised. Its weighty themes - tribal loyalty, environmental catastrophe and political myopia - are hardly out of style. Philosophically, this is a far deeper treatise than the most recent cinematic reckoning with The Odyssey. The production, featuring actors from Poland, India, Trinidad and France, and including Ciarán Hinds, was a global casting triumph. Now the film has acquired another act. Brook’s son, Simon, spent years recovering thousands of reels to restore the picture in 8K for a bow at the Venice Film Festival. This 4K restoration underlines the impressive expanse of Brook’s work: an ancient epic doesn’t require Imax or 70mm to feel immense. Craft and a rip-roaring narrative trump spectacle. On digital, Blu-ray and DVD from August 10th