Are Any Movies Actually "Epic"?

Probably not unless, we go back to the 1920s

It was the other day when, explaining to a class, I ran into the persistent fact that nobody really knew what an “epic” is.

To the youth, which includes my own children, who might be reading this, “epic” just means “great.”

As in marketing: “Terrifier 3 is an epic movie!”

Or as in urban slang: “bruh’s rizz be epic!”

I do not actually know what those last four words mean, but I do know that “epic” long ago became the tool of hype, as have all adjectives that praise and blame.

With films, you either get that hype with the use of the word — “the most epic movie of the year!” — or you get an egregious misuse of the term, as in Collider’s “25 Best Epic Movies of All Time” article, in which they define the word thusly: “[a film[ that tends to be based on real events and/or real people, plays out over a runtime where an intermission often feels necessary, and has a tremendous amount of money put into production for the purpose of impressing audiences.”

Nope.

The Oxford English dictionary tells us a better story, that by at least the 16th century, “epic” meant a massive text created from an oral tradition that celebrates the founding of a city or nation, or the preservation thereof, featuring an archetypal hero who undergoes a saga of adventure and suffering, spanning a vast amount of space and time.

Now if the marketers stuck to that definition, nothing they are hocking could be called epic — certainly not the latest energy drink, or even the next Taylor-Swift tour.

I think the definition goes even further, and it calls into question whether “epic,” as I define it considering the “literary terms” books I’ve surveyed, could be applied to any movie ever. Here’s what would qualify as “epic” in literary terms:

— archetypal hero, usually a demigod, who founds or protects a nation/city via his/her wide-ranging adventures that involve many/most/all human experiences, including pain and suffering

— done in a “high” or elevated style, which in Greek is dactylic hexameter. In English, it’s blank verse.

— encyclopedic in scope, covering most if not all the known world. The epic deals with massive human questions, such as our origins, the nature of the divine, the afterlife, the questions of what civilization is and what it’s not, questions about war and peace, human suffering, gender roles, any Philosophy 101-type question.

— because of the immediate point above, the epic would be long for its medium. For books and poems, that’s hundreds of pages.

Feel free to quibble if you are more exacting than me, but these four points are enough to allow a person to act pedantically for life. “No, young bruh, that Tiktok video is NOT epic! An epic actually is . . . [mansplaining].”

One example is the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” which has been discovered over the last 150 years. Already entering a cultural period where the epic was understood and had some constriction of its definition, I think the poem is rightly given the designation.

Another is “The Odyssey,” the epic I probably am most familiar with. For students, here’s my list of 101 questions asked and perhaps answered by the text.

Check that last line in my handout above: I could easily triple this list right now. It would take three minutes at most to do so.

Notice what those questions do: they give an education to any reader.

The Odyssey instructs as much as it entertains. It subsumes the entire world to become a world of its own, a condensed A-Z guide to everything.

And like a good encyclopedia should, it confines most things to mystery and myth. Because humans know a lot less than they let on.

Now consider: has there ever been any movie that has tried to ask and address most/all of the questions above?

Probably not. Even though movies do so many great things, by the definition of “epic” above, they are far more LYRICAL than anything. That is, they represent and express a temporal set of sensations and emotions within our cumulative human experience.

At two or three hours long, any movie would have a downright hard time getting to just three of the questions above in any meaningful way, let alone twenty-four of them, let alone the hundreds that the epics address — epics such as, e.g., The Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and even half- or mock-epics like Don Quixote and Moby-Dick.

One possibility for the ultimate “film epic” is the space movie, Kubrick’s 2001, subtitled A Space Odyssey.

It meets some criteria we named above: a lengthy timespan, e.g., millions of years. Also a “high” style, which would be its combo of abstract art, highbrow cinema, and classical music that, all together, would’ve signaled to viewers in the 1960s that they weren’t just watching “I Love Lucy.”

But IDK on 2001. The movie’s characters are beyond thin, the only dynamic and vexed one being the red-eyed computer, the Cyclops figure. David Bowman only shows up halfway through the film, and he floats through most of it like a prop, something to be acted on by forces far beyond his capacity to know them. At least Odysseus does stuff: build a raft, tell a story, fight the bad guys, kiss his bride.

Consider that 2001 features only about half the human race, if its male characters are representative of Men. That’s more in line with Moby-Dick than The Divine Comedy, which features Beatrice and which is basically written in praise of the Virgin Mary. What does 2001 say about females? It’s not the movie’s fault that it doesn’t address this — it has narrower aims, as I’m arguing — but that would not really make it an epic. It’s jumping over the letter “W” in its encyclopedic vision (“W” for women, of course).

I could propose other films that pose and risk answering massive 101 questions. They tend to be space movies — because, again, the epic ranges beyond the Earth, into the depths of the afterlife and into the heavens — or they could just be Treence Malick movies. If you could combine Malick’s output from 1998 to 2010, you’re probably close to the definition of “epic.”

Then again, that’s not fair: probably other directors could combine their films into their own vision of everything.

Maybe a filmography, then, is an epic, with the artist as the archetypal hero behind the camera, hidden from view but present in the adventuring and the question-asking.

So Werner Herzog, in total, is an epic-ist.

Anyway, I have no great answers for any movie that really is an “epic” in the restrictive literary sense above. It would have to be something like 1927’s “Napoleon” or the Soviet-era version of “War and Peace” — both clocking in between 431 and 526 minutes long. Like the original listeners of the Odyssey, you’d need several days to consume the epic work.

Therefore I would look to TV for your true epic.

As is known, serial television series in the last 27 years have at least the potential for an epic scope — multiple seasons, dynamic characters, vast swaths of space and time covered, all subjects touched on and considered. But the only one I can think of that sort of got there was the hooky, mythical network TV show LOST that kind of fell flat in the end, even though it went above and beyond where anybody thought it would.

It’s possible that we have yet to see our modern epic realized. This could happen when enough people are fascinated by origins, the nature of the divine, fate and free will, and a thousand other great questions. In other words, when people are fascinated by vast mysteries, partly believing in and holding onto myths, yet prepared enough to codify and rationalize them — if the ancient-Greek continuum holds true, where myths begets epics, which beget tragedies, which beget philosophy.

I don’t see this happening tomorrow.

Yet if people are people as they always were, it’s likely to happen at some point.

But maybe you’ve got a candidate for an audiovisual epic that I overlooked? Try it out in the comments — let us know!