‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’ concert film review: this is cinema (Taylor’s version)

It took a lot to get tickets for Taylor Swift’s record-breaking The Eras Tour this summer. Not only did massive demand rapidly wipe out Ticketmaster’s rickety servers, but even if you did get through to buy a pair you’d likely have to sell a kidney to pay for them. If you missed out, fear not. If you were lucky enough to go, rejoice and reminisce. Coming right now to a cinema near you: three hours of slick, lovingly shot footage of a modern pop star operating at the very peak of her powers.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is a concert movie in the true sense. There’s no behind-the-scenes extras, or footage of Swift knocking pool balls around and looking seedy à la The Band in The Last Waltz. We open with a bird’s eye swoop into Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium and close on Swift descending into its stage with a bow, and for the 168 minutes in-between our hero is rarely out of frame. To be fair, there’s a lot to get through. As Swift explains at one point, sat at a moss-covered grand piano that fits the spooky woods aesthetic of her ‘Evermore’ period, the tour was conceived as Swift’s solution to having released multiple albums since she last toured. “What are you gonna do, play for three hours?” she says, mimicking the incredulous questions she’d get asked. This performance is her emphatic response.

As the title suggests, the show is a genre-hopping, time-travelling jaunt through nine of Swift’s studio albums as far back as 2008’s ‘Fearless’. It opens with the pop bombast of 2019’s ‘Lover’, for which a standalone tour was planned, rescheduled and eventually cancelled due to the pandemic. Next comes the rhinestone and expertly-choreographed country twang of the aforementioned ‘Fearless’. Then she’s in a witch’s cloak for the best bits from 2020’s Evermore (Although there’s no room for Haim collab ‘no body, no crime’).

The production design is as phenomenal as you’d expect given the scale of the tour. Haunted trees appear for a few songs then disappear, to be replaced (briefly) by a terrifying stadium-sized VFX snake (ushering in 2017’s ‘Reputation’) and later a wood cabin appears for ‘Folklore’, the first album she wrote after the cancellation of the ‘Lover’ tour. She closes with the big hitters of 2014’s 1989 (An imperious run of: ‘Style’, ‘Blank Space’, ‘Shake It Off’, ‘Wildest Dreams’ and ‘Bad Blood’), a couple of acoustic songs and then more than half of the dreamy pop of her most recent work, 2022’s ‘Midnights’.

It’s a staggering feat. In the space of one seamless performance, Swift is at turns a playfully eccentric artist, a country star and a genuine pop icon. Yet for all the spectacle, it might be those acoustic songs that linger longest in the memory. Her performance alone at the piano of choice ‘Midnights’ cut ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’, and the 10-minute version of ‘All Too Well’ that closes the ‘Red’ era, are spectacular reminders of what Taylor Swift can do with just an instrument and the power of her voice. Of course, as The Eras Tour proves time and again, Taylor Swift can do pretty much whatever she wants.