Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic of Elvis played fast and loose with facts, but nevertheless understood the convulsive excitement of its hero’s explosive arrival in the 1950s. The film culminated with Presley’s final performance, in 1977, during which its star Austin Butler morphed into real archive footage of Presley.
Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert continues where those final minutes left off, using 59 hours of unseen footage from the live films Elvis: That’s The Way It Is (1970) and Elvis On Tour (1972) unearthed during the filmmaker’s research for the biopic, and combining it with radically reimagined audio to produce an IMAX-ready, contemporary Elvis show. Elvis’s life and music is meanwhile explained in his own words, drawn from press conferences and onstage chat.
Peter Jackson’s technical team applied the restorative miracles pioneered on Get Back, to which Luhrmann’s crew add their own intensive work. Like Giles Martin’s Beatles remasters, the sound is boosted for 21st-century ears, while footage now resembles the sensory overload of Brett Morgen’s immersive Bowie doc Moonage Daydream.
Luhrmann’s intent to remake and remodel goes still further. “What if in a world where AI can make all sorts of illusions,” he’s explained, “the illusions were made from authentic and original material and restored with meticulous human craft?”
Little is truly revelatory. The performance-heavy 2000 re-edit of Elvis: That’s The Way It Is revealed the singer’s majesty and musical command during the early Vegas shows, while Presley’s thoughts are equally familiar from countless concert boxsets. The thunderous, bass-heavy mix meanwhile leaves some tracks with little light and shade. This does, though, suit the maximalist nature of Elvis’s ‘70s show, from his “Also Sprach Zarathustra” intro music to the panoramic “An American Trilogy”, which Luhrmann splices into a single grand prelude here.
This is billed as ‘Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC’, and as Elvis’s ’50s flit by in five minutes, with his infamously jiggling hips sped up and slowed, the director’s own jittery tics seems set to overwhelm his subject. Still, precious glimpses of pre-Army Elvis’s snake-hipped looseness and grease-stiff quiff convey his outrageous arrival. “What about the rumour that you shot your mother?” an interviewer asks. “I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong,” young Elvis smoulders.
This is followed by a bravura, Pop Art mash-up of 20 Elvis movies which is worth the price of admission on its own. Blazing Technicolor, interchangeable Elvises spiral around an acid trip reimagining of the forgotten 1968 track “Edge Of Reality” as he talks to a dog, in a cheeky psychedelic version of his blandest decade.
Luhrmann’s hyperactivity pauses with Elvis behind the curtain at the Las Vegas International Hotel. In the dark backstage, he glides forward, his quiff preceding him like a ship’s prow. There is light, screams and the concert begins. “I just do whatever I feel on stage,” he says, and whether singing with a fan-tossed black bra on his head or lying on the floor with legs casually crossed (“I’ll get up in a minute. Just hang loose…”), he operates by his own improvised rules.
Key songs are presented as AI-smoothed composites, resulting in an especially filthy “Polk Salad Annie” (“I wanna eat your fanny,” the supposedly wholesome singer mutters), and you can feel the stage’s red heat as outtake footage gets us close to the star.
Scorsese helped edit Elvis On Tour and it shows. EPiC’s closing section drawn from its footage of the singer’s 1972 journey into America is thrilling. Now dressed as a bat-caped superhero, he confronts vast arenas of fans and moves between phalanxes of motorcycle cops. “ELVIS OUR KING” a placard says, and he looks energised among his people. The grubbier reality and decline glimpsed in the original film is excised. This is a purely heroic presentation of Elvis, sonically and visually blown up to monumental size, commensurate with the performer Luhrmann looks at with love.