I’m not a fan of Taylor Swift and I don’t know much about her music beyond the famous, mostly older songs that are played all the time. But I’m not blind to the huge cultural phenomenon that she is, especially in America. Her Eras Tour, still ongoing until the end of this year, is arguably the greatest show on Earth as of right now in terms of scale and commercial value. I thought I might watch this film version of the concert to get the merest taste of what the real thing might be like especially as it has been hailed as perhaps the best concert film ever made. As expected, it’s a grand spectacle and though it still doesn’t make me a fan of her work, it did give me a better appreciation the range of themes and genres she has explored.

Making this film wasn’t just a matter of filming one of the concerts in the tour. It was edited together from footage of three shows that took place in the same SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. It was also shortened as a full show is three and a half hours and this film is only three hours long, by speeding up the transitions between acts and cutting out a few songs. Nevertheless this is probably as close to a live concert experience as it is reasonable to achieve. The show is organized into eras according to the albums the songs are from with costume changes and stage transformations to match the theme. The stage effects are indeed amazing as platforms and pieces of it are in constant motion and everything is covered by video screens, allowing them to create all kinds of illusions. Taylor Swift herself is a skilled, extremely experienced performer and every aspect of the show is designed to maximize her stage presence. There is a sense however that every move has been perfectly choreographed and practiced, down to every flick of her eyes ad every swish of her skirt. Probably that goes for the light banter as well which makes her persona feel a little inauthentic to me but judging from the crowd’s response, it didn’t seem to matter.

Maybe it’s just a matter of familiarity, but I still found the best performances to be the loud and fast pop songs like “You Belong with Me”, “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off”. Some of the older songs like the acoustic “Our Story” were nice to get to know, recalling the earliest days of her career. I’m not sure that I much care for the newer synth-pop songs like “The Man” though while her material from what she calls the Folklore period comes across as being too dreamily false and contrived. It’s kind of awesome that she wrote a song entirely about a house that she bought but it doesn’t seem like it should be anyone else’s business. After listening to so many of her songs, I found that Swift is a competent singer but there’s nothing particularly special about her voice. Even so, the incredible spectacle of the ever changing sets, dancers and effects are enough to keep me entertained and the advantage of watching this from multiple camera angles is that we get a comprehensive view of everything that is going on.

Swift made the news recently with her public endorsement of Kamala Harris as president, but even here we can see her making deliberate choices about representation. Not only are the majority of the dancers sharing the stage with her non-white, but they have a variety of body types as well, and that is certainly a public statement all on its own. Alongside the cultural impact, this concert tour is also an assertion of Swift’s own business and economic power. There are no special guests on this tour, it’s all Swift singing her own songs. This film itself was released even while the tour was still ongoing and she made her own production company make it, distributing it directly to cinemas without going through the usual channels. It’s a natural extension of her decision to rerecord albums of her old music so that she could more directly own and control them. In the concert, she thanks her fans for allowing her the freedom to experiment with so many genres and styles. What is left unsaid of course is that they continue to buy her music no matter what she does, allowing her to have an extremely lucrative career.

Anyway I’d never have paid so much money to get the live experience so it’s great that this alternative exists. Even three hours of this film is a little too much for me as I just don’t like the music enough. But it does assuage my curiosity about what a best-in-class live show with all of the effects and setup money can buy is like these days.