EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert Dir: Baz Luhrmsnn (13th Floor Film Review)
Baz Luhrmann hasn’t made a documentary. He’s staged a resurrection. With EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, he returns to the cathedral he built in Elvis — only this time, shattering the stained glass to let Elvis Presley speak for himself.
The Salt Mines and the Second Coming
The origin story already feels like the stuff of film legend: sixty-eight boxes of 35mm and 8mm footage — outtakes from Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour — unearthed from the Kansas salt mines of the Warner Bros. archive. Among them: the long-whispered 1957 “gold jacket” performance. The images were silent. The body moved, but the voice was absent.
Over two years, Luhrmann’s team restored and synchronised the material, pairing it with existing live recordings and a 45-minute audio tape of Presley reflecting on his life. The result isn’t a documentary. It isn’t even a concert film. In many ways, it’s closer to being taken to church.
You feel it immediately — it’s a call to devotion: the kinesis, the exertion, the striving for connection. The way he throws his whole body into the music. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s the Gospel according to the King himself.
Despite his desire to travel, Elvis never got to tour the globe. He was confined to the country of his birth like a bird in a gilded cage, in part due to Manager Colonel Tom Parker’s lack of a US passport — which, viewed retrospectively, feels like a travesty.
His legend instead travelled through copper wires, vinyl grooves, and satellite delays. Yet, watching this footage, you understand how he touched places he never physically stood in. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a testament to what the will to connect can achieve.
It is worth noting that Parker himself is only featured briefly, and when he appears it is to the strains of Devil in Disguise. Which may not be subtle, but if the track fits…
The jumpsuits, spanning roughly 1969 to 1974, aren’t just spectacle. They serve as armour: ritual costume and even vestments, given that performance here isn’t merely entertainment; it’s ceremony.
When he launches into American Trilogy, braiding Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the Bahamian spiritual All My Trials, the provocation is unavoidable. Black and white. Sacred and secular. Confederacy and redemption in the same breath. Presley didn’t resolve America’s contradictions — he embodied them.
That tension hums through the film.
The Human Instrument
Some of the restoration feels a touch over-polished. The rougher edges — the heavy breathing, the audible strain — seem softened in places. But even with the audio cleaned up, you still hear the cost breaking through. The lungs working. The sweat beneath the spectacle.
He races through the early hits, almost punishing them with the speed of execution, as if determined to outrun his own iconography. It recalls the vow he made after Singer Presents… Elvis — the ’68 Comeback Special — that he would never coast on nostalgia again. From that point forward, he would really mean it.
That urgency electrifies EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. Every musician onstage appears enlisted in a shared calling: high orchestration, locked-in focus, collective lift. They aren’t backing a singer. They’re delivering an experience — a ritual, a service, a communion.
The Luhrmann Paradox
And yet — here’s the provocation — EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert can feel like another overture. As if Luhrmann is still circling the definitive Elvis film he’s chasing. The tonal pivots, the surging montage, the perpetual crescendo: at times, it plays like a spectacular prelude to something even more intimate that never quite arrives.
Perhaps that’s the Luhrmann paradox: excess in pursuit of essence.
But when the film quiets — when Presley speaks in his own words — something shifts. Not the messiah. Not the brand. Not the symbol drafted into America’s endless cultural argument. Just a man acutely aware that he is part of something larger than himself.
The footage of Elvis with wife Priscilla and their infant daughter Lisa Marie reveals a man seeking a grounding family dynamic but unable to maintain it against the backdrop of his overwhelming fame.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert doesn’t dismantle the myth. It leans into it — then parts the curtain just enough to let you glimpse the man beneath the rhinestones. Not the icon engineered by commerce or dissected by historians. Just the performer — breathless, striving, reaching.
It reminds you that beneath the rhinestones and roar was simply a man trying to give all of himself away — and that kind of offering still feels sacred.
The film closes with a rendering of Bono’s 1995 poem “American David,” reframing Presley once more as a cultural giant and fragile human. As famous, in his era, as Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, even Jesus — and yet still human, bound by breath and bone.
Jo Barry
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is in cinemas Thursday, February 26th. Click here for tickets and showtimes.
