The point about this epic business, DoomsdayFAN, even if I sympathize with your general sense that this has gone on for awhile, is that words have set meanings when used in certain contexts. While it might be all right to loosely use the term to describe, say, an epic pass in football, this bit of verbal manhandling becomes actively destructive once you enter the realm where the epic is an actual term of art to describe an entire genre and approach to filmmaking. It's a little like using "sick" as a slang term at the doctor's office, or "wicked" with a priest.
Now, the Indiana Jones films are certainly working with large budgets and have some rather large-scale setpieces. There are elements within them that are treated in an epic mode to some extent. Fairly uncontroversial examples of such are the scale of the extra-populated Tanis digs, the grandly treated digging for the Ark sequence, and the Ark trek in Raiders; the elephant trek, the Pankot matte paintings, and a few spare pieces of work in the mines in Temple; perhaps the initial appearance of the tank and certainly the approach to the temple at the Canyon of the Crescent Moon in Crusade; and the mushroom cloud in Kingdom.
But there's not much beyond these, even if they themselves stand up as examples. Huge masses of extras aren't a common feature of the films, and they certainly aren't building massive works, going into battle, or revolting in the streets. We don't have a large cast featuring the best that American, British, and world cinema have to offer. We have some beautiful vistas as our characters traverse the landscape, but Spielberg doesn't go too consistently to this well; there are <I>moments</I> wherein he pays homage to the epic filmmakers, most specifically David Lean and to a lesser extent Cecil B DeMille, but these are simply elements, and not of the whole. Perhaps most significantly in the absence of a number of characters who share three or four hours of screentime among them, we don't have a deep, though enigmatic relationship with a central character who holds the reins of history itself in his hands. In his fictional world, Indy's actions have that sort of impact, but that is not what the films dwell upon. They're there to raise the stakes and fill in the story; they aren't there to place Indy among the ranks of Moses and Lawrence of Arabia.
