Introduction
I was fifteen when Elvis Aaron Presley died aged forty-two on August 16th 1977. Ironically, given the nature of his decline and early demise, I was coming down from my first taste of illegal drugs, a ‘Black Bomber’ Speed pill, when I returned home to my parents’ Grimsby council house in time to hear legendary ITV News reader Reggie Bosonquet drunkenly slur the words ‘Elvis Presley is dead.’
This has little to do with the review to follow, but hopefully it’s a dramatic enough opening to keep you reading.
I’d enjoyed Luhman’s 2022 Elvis biopic at the cinema, and gave it a positive review (Baz Luhmnan’s Elvis reviewed | Counter Culture), though the faults and the clearly fictionalised elements, especially the re-imagining of the the build up to the 1968 TV Special as an almost literal farce, became more annoying on my second and third viewings on disc in the privacy of my own home.
A Baz Luhman film is always very much a ‘Baz Luhman film’ in the same way that a Tim Burton film is always a ‘Tim Burton film’. You either like it or you don’t. On balance, and I went on to watch Luhman’s Australia and his remake of West Side Story after I’d seen his Elvis, I do.
Here, there are no fictional aspects. What we get is pure Elvis all the way, the man himself in rehearsal and in concert, mostly circa 1970-71 when he was at his peak as a performer, interspersed with narration by Elvis himself.
Baz’s trademark fast-cutting style is, however, very much in evidence and, with a few reservations, it works well.
The genesis of the movie was when Luhman was gathering material for his biopic and was given access to the archives at Graceland. Here, he discovered hundreds of hours of previously unseen footage. Most of it had been shot for the two concert film documentaries released during Presley’s lifetime, Elvis That’s The Way It Is from 1970 and Elvis on Tour two years later.
We do get a brief montage of the Elvis story up to this point: 1950s Elvis filmed from the waist up only on the Ed Sullivan show lest his suggestive gyrations further corrupt the youth of America, and in performance in his iconic gold lamé suit.
We also get the usual perfunctory run-through of the, mostly rightly maligned, ‘movie years’ of 1961 – 1968 (though not all of them were that bad). But aside from that, it’s early-seventies Elvis all the way, when he was clearly delighted to be back in front of a live audience, in Vegas and then on the road, before the much-told story of his decline and fall properly began.
Some of the footage unearthed by Luhman was silent, and all was in urgent need of restoration.
This was were Peter Jackson’s Weta FX company came in, the team responsible for the excellent They Shall Not Grow Old First World War centenary documentary in 2018, and for beautifying the visuals and separating, improving and synchronising the audio for the Beatles January 1969 sessions for what became the monumental near eight-hour Get Back documentary released in November 2021, and extensively reviewed by me here (A Month in the Life: Peter Jackson’s The Beatles Get Back reviewed | Counter Culture).
So, with the dream combination of peak-Elvis, Baz Luhman and team-Jackson, it seemed that not much could go wrong with EPiC.
And, spoiler alert, very little did.
Negatives
There really aren’t many of them.
With so much footage and audio available, maybe we could have got more than the hour-and-thirty-seven minutes, including credits, that we did. For his biopic, Luhman talked about his hope to put out an extended four-hour cut of the movie. I assume he decided to go for EPiC instead, and with all that rehearsal and concert material at his disposal, there seems no reason we shouldn’t get an extended version on a future Blu-ray release. Maybe not on the scale of Get Back, but I’d certainly be happy with another hour or two.
As is true of Get Back, a valid criticism is the lack of complete songs. Some nearly make it, from memory, Suspicious Minds, Polk Salad Annie, Burning Love. Nearly, but not quite, and it would have been nice to hear a few from start to finish.
Some purists of the John Lennon ‘Elvis died when he went in the army’ school of thought, will argue for the inclusion of more material from the 1950s, that that period represented the ‘real’ Elvis. But I doubt there’s much we haven’t already seen, and it should be remembered that in that relatively brief period of Elvis mania, Elvis was performing short, 25-30 minute sets before audiences of primarily screaming girls. The same is true of the Beatles during their Beatlemania touring years, 1963-66. Arguably, the only time the Beatles got to demonstrate what a tight and brilliant rock band they could have become was on the Apple rooftop on January 30th 1969, and all we got was five songs (some repeated). With Elvis, we are fortunate to have such a wealth of evidence thathereally had matured into a fabulous and assured live performer with the ability to spellbind an audience in full sixty to ninety-minute concerts.
I did find the exclusion of anything from the 1968 TV Special (Elvis hated it being referred to as the ‘Comeback’ special) strange. True, we’ve probably seen all there is to see. I have a four DVD box set that more than covers it, and it was a television show rather than a genuine concert, with stops and starts for retakes etc, in front of an invited rather than a paying audience.
But[GC1] it would have been nice to have seen one of the many run-throughs of Baby What Do You Want Me To? Or maybe the breathtaking If I Can Dream conclusion. This was, after all, his first live performance in front of any kind of audience in seven years, and its omission left a gap in the story which, as I’ve mentioned, was not covered as well as it could have been in the biopic.
That we see nothing of his very first Vegas season in the summer of 1969 is no fault of Luhman, nor of Elvis. Though we have the fabulous audio for these shows to buy or stream, it never seems to have occurred to Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker (‘neither a Colonel nor a Tom nor a Parker’ as one wag put it), to have filmed at least some of these historic performances.
Arguably, the time period covered by the film could have concluded with the January 1973 Aloha From Hawaii concert, the biggest television audience Elvis ever played to, though Parker’s one-billion figure was almost certainly an exaggeration. Personally, I think EPiC stops at the right time. I’ve always found, despite the vast audience, Elvis’ performance at the Hawaii show to be somewhat lacklustre. I see it as ‘early decline’ rather than ‘peak’.
My only other criticism is that while the audio for the film is fabulous, especially in the iMax screening I attended, the drums are mixed inappropriately loud for some of the songs, particularly for the ballads, most glaringly on Always On My Mind.
Apart from these minor issues, it’s positive all the way from me.
Positives
Firstly, of course, it’s Elvis Presley at the height of his powers as a live performer, showing himself to be a master of a variety of musical styles. To give a few examples, we have great contemporary pop/rock such as Suspicious Minds and Burning Love. Country songs like the Always On My Mind. Big ballads like The Wonder of You and American Trilogy. Rhythm and Blues is well represented in songs like Tiger Man and Polk Salad Annie, gospel music by How Great Thou Art, and even his rare foray into protest music with In The Ghetto.
We also get to see Elvis as one of the greatest of all interpreters of other people’s songs. From my first viewing of Elvis That’s The Way It Is, on television a couple of years before his death, there were certain songs like the Righteous Brothers You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water where I knew the Elvis version before I knew the original, and I still prefer the Elvis versions to this day (Paul Simon praised Elvis’ version of ‘Bridge’ when he first saw him perform it at Madison Square Garden. But later, he changed his mind and got all precious about it. There are reasons that, great songwriter that he is, nobody seems to like Paul Simon.)
Anyway, both of these songs are present and correct here, and both are among the stand-out performances.
But not only does Elvis sound fabulous, he also looks fabulous. Personally, I believe sexuality to be a spectrum rather than a fixed identity. I regard myself as approximately 98.7% heterosexual. But, save perhaps for a young Elizabeth Taylor, has any human being ever looked more beautiful than Elvis did between, approximately, 1968 and 1971?
Man, that guy was hot.
The action cuts seamlessly between rehearsal footage and live concert footage, and within the same song. I have no idea of the technical aspects of how this was accomplished, or even whether the audio we are hearing comes from the concert, the rehearsal or a combination of both. But it works brilliantly. You really can’t hear the join.
Although I love the ‘in concert’ aspects, I enjoyed the rehearsal footage even more. Some criticise Elvis for the huge array of backing he assembled on stage, the gospel quartet, the Sweet Inspirations girl backing vocalists, the brass, the strings (a full orchestra in Vegas, a more scaled down ensemble on tour). Among those critics was George Harrison in the original 1995 Beatles Anthology (dropped from the 2025 updated version) who complained about ‘All those chick singers.’
I really have no problem with any of this, and have come to see 1970s live Elvis as almost a distinct musical genre in its own right though, to be fair, he did take some inspiration from the way his friend Tom Jones was wowing Vegas with a similar big band approach in the late ‘60s (less successfully, after Elvis’ death, Bob Dylan went for something similar on tour, as can be heard on his Live at the Budokan album.)
But what is often forgotten is that at the heart of Elvis monumental wall of sound was one of the tightest little rock ‘n’ roll bands you’re ever likely to hear. James Burton on lead guitar, Ronnie Tutt on drums, Jerry Scheff on bass, and Glenn D. Hardin on piano.
They were the nucleus, and in EPiC we get to see a casually dressed Elvis (well, as casual as he got) hanging out with them, rehearsing in the studio, having fun as essentially the lead singer in a great band rather than a distant and unapproachable icon in a diamond-speckled, God-like white jumpsuit.
Except that he was so much more than the lead singer. What we see here is that at this stage, though sadly this would soon change, Elvis was involved in every aspect of putting together his show, in song choices, as an arranger, and as a choreographer. Watch the band, both in the studio and on the stage. They barely take their eyes off their leader, because he is literally directing them in the moment.
The absolute highlight in a movie of highlights for me was the Little Sister/Get Back medley. Previously, a brief clip of this had been shown in the vastly superior second version of That’s The Way It Is. But here we get to see it, almost, in full, cutting rapidly between rehearsal and the stage.
This was the highlight for me because, outside of the ’68 Special, where he played Scotty Moore’s big electro-acoustic throughout the ‘sit down’ sections, we have precious little visual evidence that Elvis was a decent guitarist.
But he was. On those fabulous early Sun records, that’s Elvis acoustic you hear up front. He even played bass a couple of years later on Baby I Don’t Care.
Too many have seen only clips of him from the ‘50s or from the movies, with an unplayed guitar draped around his neck as a prop and assume, erroneously, that he couldn’t really play. He showed in ’68 that he could, and in EPiC for the very first time, I got to see film of which I had previously seen only a photograph, of Elvis sitting on stage on a stool, in his jumpsuit, fully plugged in as the electric rhythm guitarist as well as the singer/band leader of his amazing band.
A wonderful moment, and something I really do hope to see more of in an extended cut.
As an aside, it should also be noted that Elvis was also an accomplished pianist. I presume he never played piano on stage in the period covered by the film. The only concert footage I’ve ever seen of him at the keys comes from the very last tour of his career, ailing but heroic and near-operatic as he performs Unchained Melody from the piano.
Conclusion
What more is there to say? EPiC is simply EPIC. It has finished its iMax run now, but it’s well worth seeing at an ‘ordinary’ screening, or even on your TV, when the opportunity arises. It’s a great piece of work by Luhman, and one that may even have those who are a bit ‘meh’ about, or even unaware of Elvis, reaching for the superlatives.
Anthony C Green, March 2026
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