Seems like a question that has been answered countless times.
My php.ini should allow it. My .htaccess also ought to be supporting it. I have, in the past and in some older answered posts, seen that if I copy php.ini into working directories of the scripts, it will resolve. No dice.
I have also made a new configuration file in CodeIgniter's system config folder to allow for large uploads, larger than I'm trying. The limit in MB could be arbitrary, I'm guessing it could also be a thread/process time limit but I set that to be pretty high for testing this as well.
I have restarted apache2. Still no luck. I'm on AWS services with an EC2, ElasticBeanstalk, and S3.