Before the Beatles, before Michael Jackson, before Taylor Swift, there was Elvis Presley. Nearly five decades after his death, he remains less a memory than a presence: smouldering on streaming platforms, resurrected on cinema screens, endlessly imitated but never fully contained. People love him for the voice — for the way it could turn a gospel cry into a pop hook.
They also cherish something gentler: the shyness, the awkward humour, the flickers of humility that complicated the legend. At the same time, Elvis endures as a cautionary figure, a man trapped inside an image too large to escape.
With EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, filmmaker Baz Luhrmann attempts something unusual. He does not revisit biographies that are already out there. Nor does he offer a conventional documentary heavy with experts and retrospection. Instead, he builds what feels like a séance on an IMAX screen: Elvis in his own words, singing and speaking, unfiltered.
Footage that time forgot
While making Elvis, Luhrmann heard rumours of lost reels — material that Warner Bros. had long stored in salt mines in Kansas, preserved in controlled darkness. What he found were dozens of boxes containing 59 hours of unseen footage, much of it outtakes from the concert films Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour. These recordings, alongside rarely seen material from the Graceland archives, were painstakingly restored.
There was a problem: it was all image and no sound. Film and audio had been recorded and archived separately. The team often did not know what he was singing.
The restoration specialists associated with Peter Jackson gave the material the Get Back treatment, reviving the raw footage in 4K. Once the images were stabilised and cleaned, Luhrmann’s team set about synchronising them with any and all available sound recordings.
A breakthrough came when the filmmakers uncovered an audio-only interview Presley had agreed to after a late night of gospel singing. Recorded during the making of Elvis on Tour, it captured him speaking candidly about his life and career. That tape now forms the spine of the film.
The man beyond the myth
In EPiC, there are no talking heads. No cultural commentators. Elvis narrates himself. “Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it… and I couldn’t say anything about it,” he says at one point. The line lands not as grievance but as weary recognition.
The film insists on a simple proposition: the image is one thing; the human being another. Elvis, who died at 42, understood that tension intimately. “It’s very hard to live up to an image,” he once said. Popular culture has reduced him to caricature — the swivelling hips, the white jumpsuit, the fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. What Luhrmann restores is the rawness beneath the costume.
The Elvis who emerges here is older than the rebel of the 1950s. He is charismatic and funny, yes, but also vulnerable. He grew up poor in Tupelo, Mississippi. Fame did not erase his early insecurity; it merely cloaked it in rhinestones.
In the 1950s, establishment entertainers mocked him. Bob Hope labelled him “the Tennessee Twitcher”, and Frank Sinatra dismissed Presley’s music as “a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac”. What they failed to grasp was that the extremes of America were embodied in him — a rags-to-riches story that would eventually descend into excess and dependency. Even now, his life remains a conversation starter.
The magnetism seen in the film is not nostalgic; it is immediate. There is a reason audiences fainted at performances of songs such as Burning Love.
Yet the film carries an element of constraint. Elvis wanted to tour internationally. He dreamed of performing in places such as Australia. But his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, kept him geographically tethered to the United States. Parker’s control extended to film roles as well, steering him into formula pictures when he longed for creative expansion. After Elvis’s death, Parker reportedly remarked, chillingly, that he would go right on managing him.
In performance footage from the post-1968 Comeback Special era, you see an artiste orchestrating his sound. He was not merely a voice but a musical director, a collaborator with sharp instincts.
Luhrmann describes EPiC as neither documentary nor concert film but something closer to a dreamscape. Elvis steps forward and addresses the viewer directly. The effect is intimate. One of the film’s surprises is his goofiness: the sly jokes, the quick grin.
Restoring magnitude
Over time, culture shrinks its icons. They become costumes, impressions, sound bites. Elvis was never small. By projecting restored footage in IMAX, Luhrmann restores scale — literal and metaphorical. The King fills the frame again.
That decision carries a certain poetic justice. Elvis’s impact was global, but his physical presence remained largely confined to America (aside from three shows in Canada in 1957). In this film, he travels as he could not in life. He reaches audiences across continents.
At a moment when art is compressed into phone screens and consumed in fragments, there is something bracing about seeing a performer at full scale. You leave the theatre with renewed respect for the craft — for the way Elvis shaped a song, bent a note, teased a crowd — and with a deeper understanding of the man behind the myth.
He is not a relic. He is not a punchline. He performed nearly 1,100 concerts between 1969 and 1977, sometimes three a day. In EPiC, Elvis Presley is what he always was: a presence. And that presence feels startlingly alive even now.