With newspapers and magazines heralding Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of “War and Peace” with all the ballyhoo normally reserved for a Lindsay Lohan arrest, and the Metropolitan Opera staging a gargantuan version of Sergei Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” in December, Leo Tolstoy’s 1,312-page ox stunner of a novel is suddenly, 138 years after its initial publication, hot. This poses a dilemma for New Yorkers who want to be in the know: It’s too late to start reading the thing if you didn’t begin plowing through it long before the hype began, and buying Cliffs Notes would be downright tacky, so how do you pretend you’ve read it at this point? Film Forum comes to the rescue with its screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1968 film version of “War and Peace.” Unfortunately, it’s almost seven hours long. Fortunately, it’s amazing.

Like Kevin Costner, Mr. Bondarchuk was an actor who decided to direct an epic motion picture starring himself, although unlike “Waterworld” or “The Postman,” “War and Peace” turns out to be worth the effort. Shot over five years, it cost around $100 million ($500 million in today’s dollars) and mobilized the entire Russian film industry, won an Academy Award, employed 120,000 actors, and is pretty much forgotten these days.

Although Film Forum is showing”War and Peace” in two parts, it actually consists of four films. Part One charts the disillusionment of the central characters, Pierre Bezukhov (Bondarchuk) and Prince Andrei (Vyacheslav Tikhonov); Part Two chronicles the doomed love affair between Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostova (Lyudmila Savelyeva); Part Three is dedicated to the clash between Napoleon Bonaparte’s advancing armies and Russian forces at the Battle of Borodino; and Part Four is a real overachievement, squeezing in the burning of Moscow and Napoleon’s retreat from Russia while neatly wrapping up every dangling plot thread.

As the first movie begins, St. Petersburg’s glittering high society is slowly being militarized as Napoleon marches in from the border, his armies chewing up the Russian countryside like a swarm of locusts. Melancholy Prince Andrei, killing time before his deployment to the front, is disgusted by the softness of city living and by his wife, whose pregnancy makes her needy and emotional. He yearns to be baptized by fire and prove his manliness on the battlefield. His friend, Pierre Bezukhov, has the blinking, watery eyes and slack jaw of a man who doesn’t quite follow the world around him. His head stuffed full of books, he can’t be a soldier so he swills wine with a trained bear, waiting for his life to begin. These two men form the backbone of “War and Peace,” a collective North Star the audience can use to stay oriented as they plunge into the churning sea of relatives, friends, comrades, battles, and brio that swirl through the next six hours of film.

“War and Peace” is a long movie, it’s a sprawling movie, and if it were presented tastefully, it would be an unbearable movie. Fortunately, Bondarchuk held the concept of good taste in low regard. The movie opens with one of many prose poems shouted ecstatically over shots of trees and fungus and fields, like a montage of forgotten album covers from the psychedelic ’70s. Crazy editing strategies abound, double exposures expose souls, subliminal smash cuts of funky blue crystals interrupt a waltz, the screen splits into three parts, there are point-of-view shots from drunk, wounded, and dying characters, primitive synthesizers squeeze out space sounds over the battle scenes — it’s like a production of “Doctor Zhivago” by Ken Kesey.

But saying “War and Peace” lacks good taste doesn’t imply that it’s tacky; it means Bondarchuk is free to pursue his goals without restraint. Good taste is too timid for his mission, which is not only to show audiences what happens in Tolstoy’s book, but to make them feel it, as well. And the first thing he does is overwhelm your senses with awe-inspiring spectacle, sharpened with a novelist’s attention to detail. The Battle of Borodino pauses for Napoleon’s tea break while a stampede of riderless horses charges through the cannon smoke like an apparition. The burning of Moscow is first presented as a collage of surreal images — ashes falling like snow, a man laughing maniacally, a pair of shoes being stolen, soldiers wading knee-deep in a cellar flooded with wine — before the camera pulls out and out and out into a panorama of human suffering so vast your eyeballs begin to vibrate in their sockets. Projected in IMAX it would probably kill the audience.

When a movie about war comes up for review, one has to confront the question: Is it about The War? Is there anything applicable here to our situation in Iraq? Not really. “War and Peace” is too big to have a moral or a thesis statement, too massive to be parsed; you have to experience it the same way you experience a Mozart symphony or a cathedral. Once you pass the four-hour mark in the cinema, you either need to let go of your preconceptions and go with the flow, or find yourself another movie. And surrendering to “War and Peace” is deeply rewarding.

There’s a moment in hour three when the movie’s scale, its length, and even the damage to this 40-year-old print all combine to stir your soul. Previously, the teenage Natasha Rostova has been little more than an annoyance, flitting around for two hours like a deranged ballerina (which, in fact, she is — this is dancer Lyudmila Savelyeva’s debut). Suddenly the film switches to her point of view as she prepares for her first ball. She makes her entrance and is overcome with nerves, terrified that no one will ask her to dance and, like her paranoia made manifest, the screen darkens and swarms with age and scratches as she wilts, pressing herself to the wall like a frightened child. Prince Andrei approaches, asks for a waltz, and as the music begins her face lights up, the print damage lifts like a curtain, the image is suddenly as fresh and pure and vibrant as she is, as the music is.

As Bondarchuk’s camera floats up to the ceiling, hundreds of extras twirl across the floor with the Prince and Natasha in the center and you realize that this is a feeling that can’t be replicated by a book or a play or a painting. It can’t be captured by words. It’s pure cinema, and it will take your breath away.

Through November 1 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).