"Epic Movies" where have they gone?

[marcosgt]

I was listening to a piece on the radio this morning about the re-release of Zulu at the cinema and it made me think that they don't make "Epic" movies any more.

Films with huge casts, massive setpieces and battles (where appropriate) and epic struggle themes.

The last REAL epic I can think of is "A Bridge Too Far", but that must be 40 years old now.

"Gladiator" had a bold stab, but a lot of it is CGI, as are the later Star Wars and Lord of The Rings films (perhaps the original ones qualified before Lucas started meddling too much), although they all fall down on the 'star count'.

So, have I missed anything or are the true "Epics" a thing of the past?

M

[marcosgt]

Mr Will said:

marcosgt said:

"Gladiator" had a bold stab, but a lot of it is CGI, as are the later Star Wars and Lord of The Rings films (perhaps the original ones qualified before Lucas started meddling too much), although they all fall down on the 'star count'.

Why does CGI rule them out? Does it really make a difference if it's a few thousand underpaid locals or a few thousand computer generated images running around in the background of the battle scenes? Although I'm not a LotR fan, I think you'd struggle to class them as anything other than epics.

Some films make great use of CGI (Gravity and Oblivion are two that spring to mind of recent films), but, whilst I quite enjoyed the scale of the LOTR trilogy, it was painfully obvious (maybe just to me), that I was really just watching a long cut scene from a video game.

I guess it's cinematography that rules out the 'large scale CGI movies' as what I think of as epics.

I can see they were all done on computers and that makes a scene with 10,000 characters a lot less impressive than a few hundred REAL people running/fighting/lying-down in a field.

I'm not discounting these films outright as they make some previously impossible scenes seem credible (I mean, walking trees? You couldn't have done that with men in suits, could you?), but I think, as with most technology, they'll look a bit clunky in 20/30/40 years time.

M

Edited by marcosgt on Wednesday 11th June 15:33