The centrality of special, visual and digital effects to the epic film is – even at first glance – undeniable. The return of ancient subjects to the big screen, the focus of this book, has gone hand in hand with technological developments which allow for ever greater renditions of architecture, crowds, forums, panoramas and battle sequences, creating a new cinematic vocabulary which in part uses stylistic embellishments which were unavailable to earlier epics – high-definition, digital surround sound, post-production effects, etc. – and in part resurrects showy set pieces which have always been a standard ingredient for the epic film, but which are here enhanced by new technologies – battle scenes with armies of thousands, explosions, lifelike prosthetics to create bloody battles, blood spatters, and dizzying re-creations of classical architecture. These spectacular images, perhaps even more than earlier cycles of big-budget epics, have come to suggest that the surge and splendour which Vivian Sobchack once identified as characteristic of the 1950s and 60s epics are equally at home in the new epic film. As Monica Cyrino comments, ‘with the recent advent of computer generated imagery (CGI), blue-screen and other modern technological advances, extravagant digital special effects have become, and continue to be, an intrinsic part of the production of contemporary epic cinema’. Likewise Kirsten Thompson makes a convincing case that, just as once ‘the historical epic became indelibly linked to widescreen spectacle’, now once again ‘digital innovations in special effects have enabled the intensification of the historical epic's distinctive attributes of spectacularity, monumentality, and immersiveness’.