Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is a dazzling achievement, capturing the sensation of seeing the pop goddess’ sold-out concerts in all their enormity and intimacy. An exhilarating, impressively immersive screen experience, the epic concert movie, which features more than three dozen songs, was filmed over three shows in Los Angeles during the pop icon's record-breaking global tour.
The Eras Tour is as big as they come, in just about every sense imaginable: the stage show, which is currently on track to become the most lucrative tour of all time, is a three-and-a-half-hour extravaganza. The draw is irresistible no matter how much you think you like Taylor Swift.
Directed by Sam Wrench, who has helmed concert films for Billie Eilish, Lizzo and Brandi Carlile, the film is a feat of scale. It captures the singer in such crystal, steady vision that you can collect treasures of details. Swift never seems to tire throughout the entire three hours. She opens her marathon set with the eminently sing-along-able “Cruel Summer” and rides that energy all the way up through the buoyant finale, “Karma.”
The woman on stage manages to be both powerful enough to make a crowd scream themselves hoarse with the point of a finger, and so modest that she claims to feel guilty even asking us to let her sing one more song before she goes.
Swift is a singer/songwriter whose built her career on love songs, and yet her truest love seems not to be any of her much-discussed celebrity boyfriends, but all of us. The Eras tour, she says, has been the most special experience of her life; in this deft rendering, it’s easy to feel the intoxication of being in her temple.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, rated PG, plays at the Patricia Theatre in Powell River from November 23 to November 26 at 7 pm, with a matinee on Sunday, November 26, at 1:30 pm. Running time is two hours and 48 minutes.
Gary Shilling is executive director of qathet Film Society.
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