COMMENTARY : The Epic, an Endangered Species : The world isn’t the place it was when our screen heroes went a-conquering, but today’s cinema could use a little more of that scope

David Lean, the recipient of this year’s American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, is the world’s leading exemplar of the epic film maker. At 82, he’s preparing to direct an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s great, mad novel “Nostromo,” and already the project is being talked about not only as Lean’s Last Stand but, also, as the last great outpost of the epic adventure film. The lionization of Lean is both a tribute to the grandeur of his best work, like “Lawrence of Arabia,” and a recognition that such grandeur has mostly vanished from the screen.

As it happens, a Lean-like movie recently opened, Bob Rafelson’s “Mountains of the Moon,” about Sir Richard Burton and the quest for the source of the Nile. It’s an epic, all right, but a dull one. Still, those of us who love grand-scale spectacle may be willing to indulge the film for old time’s sake. The form inspires, even if the movie doesn’t.

Epic adventure movies have never been in large supply but, until the last several decades, they were a dependably tried-and-true staple. Films like “King Solomon’s Mines,” both the 1937 and 1950 versions, or the 1939 “Stanley and Livingstone”--to name a few of my faves--delivered uncomplicated storylines, stalwart heroes and lots of fervid junglescapes. As racial-historical tracts, they never rose much above the Call-Me-Bwana level, but that didn’t seem to matter much. Except as fantasies, nobody took these films seriously anyway. They were the product of eras which could easily accommodate their Victorianized boys’-book reactionaryism. Heroism was defined as action, and action was most often expressed as the use of force.

But all that was a while ago. In cultural terms, the comparatively “politically aware” eras that followed exposed the Great White Hunter trappings of these films and made their continuation in the same form untenable. The ways in which the white hunters were championed and the natives devalued was perceived as a noxious simplification--an evasion of the true nature of colonialism.

There are other reasons for the demise of the epic adventure film. For one, costs have become prohibitive, at least in theory. (“Mountains of the Moon” was financed for a relatively measly $18 million; Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” cost around $23 million.) Studios are still quite capable of coughing up kingly fortunes to finance their movies, but they tend to put their bucks into star salaries and hardware. Making a movie involving oodles of extras and far-off locations, with period sets and costumes, is not the sort of expedition that Hollywood’s Great White Studio Heads are particularly willing to endure.

Movies of exploration are also regarded as antiquated in the modern era. What is there left to discover? Territorial exploration has moved beyond earthly borders. Outer space is the new uncharted jungle--just substitute hostile aliens (usually “dark”) for hostile natives. In such a play-act universe, heroes and villains can act out the same old reactionary scenarios without rankling any real-world political sensitivities.

The never-never-land settings also make it possible to portray, often tongue-in-cheek, the kind of straight-arrow, unambiguous heroes who can no longer be comfortably depicted in American movies in the post-Vietnam phase. Vietnam altered the portrayal of heroism in American movies by calling into question the country’s motivations for foreign expeditions.

The image of the American as the square-jawed avenger of injustice was turned on its head; in counterculture terms, what once was regarded as heroism was converted into a species of villainy. The use of force carried tragic consequences. The new hero who emerged from this smoking debris turned out to be the man who valued his ability to run away from danger. He wasn’t John Wayne. He was Woody Allen and Richard Pryor. This has changed somewhat. Currently, the new product line of American movie hero is the one who voyages inward. Victories are not territorial but emotional, and small-scale --they’re about learning how to read, how to love again.

Within the past few decades, the adventure epic, when it hasn’t transferred to outer space, has been almost exclusively spoofy. From the “Indiana Jones” cycle on down to “Romancing the Stone” and “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” these epics buy off their antique ooga-booga ideologies by turning the whole expeditionary enterprise into a joke. They bring to the fore the absurdities that were always lurking just below the stalwart surface of the genre. It’s understandable that a director like Steven Spielberg, who by his own admission was in strong measure formed as a film maker watching such movies as “Lawrence of Arabia,” would feel drawn to the epic form; or that, given his essentially kicky-adolescent world view, he would instinctively lampoon the form as a way of making it his own. But even the best of these adventure spoofs are somewhat disappointing--weightless. There isn’t much that’s awesome in the movies anymore, and so it’s disconcerting to see awe-inspiring feats in majestic landscapes reduced to rinky-dink high jinks.

When epic adventures aren’t being spoofy, they are often being revisionist. In movies like “Greystoke” and “The Mission,” the form is used as an ideological chalkboard. The pure pleasures of epic panorama are subverted to the “message,” which is often bulky and overweening: the Nature of Man, the Nature of Imperialism, and so on. There’s nothing illicit about using a king-size canvas to push a personal agenda--D.W. Griffith did it--but too many of the agendas are as bloated as their movie’s budgets. Movies are an inadequate medium for conveying complex sociopolitical arguments; they’re much better at sensation and immediacy, and the epic form only tends to emphasize the inadequacy.

The demise of the epic-adventure film is, of course, all-of-a-piece with the demise of the epic film in general. The epic survives in its purest form not on the big screen but on the small, as miniseries. Films with subjects of epic historical scope like, say, “Roots” or “The Thorn Birds” or “Lonesome Dove,” are now almost strictly the province of television.

It’s ironic that the movie business, which reacted to the threat of television in the ‘50s by scaling things big and high and wide, should now have turned tail and relinquished the epic to the airwaves. An entire generation of young viewers has grown up with a distorted idea of the epic film, because the epics they watch are all housed in a small box, where most of the qualities that made them worth watching are eliminated. Many of the movie theaters in the multiplexes are small boxes too. Is it any wonder film makers are so reluctant to embark on epic projects?

It may only be a matter of time before television also disposes of the epic form. The disappointing ratings for a humongous series like “War and Remembrance” was taken as an object lesson by the networks; it’s doubtful that, in the current climate, even a “Lonesome Dove” could be made again. The sound-bite ethos of television has taken its toll on the national attention span and cramped the medium’s ability to convey the significance of monumental events. Television is being employed without a sense of historical moment; you would never know from watching most news shows that we are in the middle of one of greatest global political shifts in the 20th Century. The epic movie is predicated on a sense of narrative history, and that sense is increasingly absent from mass culture.

This doesn’t mean that good epics, exploration-adventure or otherwise, still can’t, or shouldn’t be made. It’s a mistake to assume that these movies have to cost zillions, or that they should only respond to the four-square conservatism of the times by mythologizing four-square conservative heroes. Epics can embrace diverse mythologies--it all depends who’s doing the mythologizing.

It’s also a mistake to discount old-fashioned “King Solomon’s Mines”-type squareness. Square doesn’t necessarily have to be reactionary; it can be beautiful too. The impulse to create comprehensible heroes who live on in some protected precinct of our childhoods is not to be belittled. Probably the best epic adventure movie of the past 15 years, John Huston’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” was frankly and unapologetically an outsider’s vision, with no attempt to “modernize” its view of the natives. On the other side, “Lawrence of Arabia” demonstrated that the epic adventure could accommodate a hero who was, at bottom, incomprehensible. Lean’s stately craftsmanship set off T.E. Lawrence’s depth-charged psychological ambiguities, and that’s what made the film seem so traditional and yet so modern.

The epic form is alive as long as there are writers and directors with epic imaginations, and actors who can embody their visions. And there are, there are. We’re surrounded by directors (Roger Spottiswoode, Geoff Murphy, and Fred Schepisi, for starters) and actors (Nick Nolte, Judy Davis, Denzel Washington, Aidan Quinn immediately come to mind) who carry around even in their small-scale work an epic purchase on history. They’re poised for heroic themes.

Epic movies aren’t some lumbering offshoot of the medium. Their sheer bigness is basic to the medium, as basic as the quality of stardom. If you were born before the ‘60s, chances are that the movies that first opened your eyes were the swashbuckling spectacles. They may not always have been very good, but they suggested reaches of adventure and heroism and history that made moviegoing the most exciting of romances. It’s high time to renew the romance.

I can’t wait for “Nostromo.”