^ That works fine - I would try not to get hung up on the word. Because I'm not talking about how it affected the audience, or how powerful it was emotionally - but tone.
According to the Literary Terms & Poetry Glossary, tone is "the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; the intonation of the voice that expresses meaning. Tone is the result of allusion, diction, figurative language, imagery, irony, symbol, syntax, style, and so on."
S:TM was epic in tone because of its imagery, symbology, syntax and style. For instance it made very explicit allusions to Kal-El as Christ allegory such as the shot of him standing up from the wreckage of his space ship which referenced numerous medieval works of art showing the Christ child. It cast Jor-El as God the Father. It was fond, in the first two acts anyway, of sweeping long shots of the sort you find in Lawrence of Arabia and Lord of the Rings. These things create an epic tone - larger than life, beyond the realm of mortal men.
In contrast Batman Begins, while involving globetrotting, kepts its shots almost excluisively tight on the character of Bruce Wayne, even when he's tackling the icy mountain - it was nearly claustrophobic in its visual syntax. It made no effort to equate Bruce with any force of nature or religious figure - quite the opposite, it showed him consciously, humanly, seeking to adopt such an image as a tool. So even though you get the lovely shot of him standing in the midst of the cave with the bats whirling around - the movie wasn't giving you any of the oft-used Batman "I AM the Night" business - it was showing a young man conquering his personal fears and bending them to his personal will. It focused on his limitations as a human man, the imperfect tools he used to create the illusion of being a force of nature - but the audience was in on it, so it doesn't fold us into the illusion.
Compare that to Batman '89 - first shot of Batman is as mysterious figure on rooftop, hearing screams from below, calmly melting back into the shadows, unhurried - supernatural. The first long shot of Gotham is from a perspective far away and the city looks like a Rube Goldberg concoction of labyrinthine, even impossible buildings. In Batman Begins, the only long shot of Gotham comes as Bruce looks out the window a plane, and it looks like any other city when anybody approaches from a plane. Different syntax.
You could maybe make a case for Joker's impossible strategies in TDK having a touch of epic, if the rest of the movie wasn't so clearly focused on feeling like a police procedural.
Am I managing to be any clearer about what I mean?
