BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
REVIEW
SINCE HUMANKIND HAS BEEN WALKING upright, and maybe even when we still had fins for arms, we’ve been attracted to shiny, shimmering things. In concert, Taylor Swift is exactly that. Tickets for the Eras Tour, Swift’s first concert tour in five years—set to conclude in November 2024—were costly and difficult to get, which meant you had to either be very lucky or fall within a certain income bracket to participate. But the spirit of the Eras Tour is now available to almost everyone in the form of a concert film, one that is perhaps unsurprisingly exuberant and delightful. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is 2 hr. 48 min. of an irresistibly shiny, shimmering Taylor Swift. She’s the lure skimming through the water; we’re the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence. All that for less than 20 bucks.
We are trout, it seems, of many different shapes, sizes, ages, and orientations (even if, statistically, three-quarters of us are white). I saw the film on what was supposed to have been its opening night, although in one of Swift’s trademark last-minute moves, she launched the film early. (Swift, who self-produced the film, is distributing it in partnership with AMC.) My enthusiastic audience was about one-third young women, one-third little girls in sparkly attire (accompanied by their parents), and one-third gay men. One of the men handed me an elastic circlet strung with turquoise and smoke gray plastic beads, apologizing for its tiny circumference—one of the small Swifties had given it to him—though it fit me just fine. “Now you can be part of the experience,” he told me. Plenty of people could resist, but it turns out that I—really only a moderate Swift fan—am not one of them.
The Eras Tour is a cleverly if somewhat haphazardly stitched-together approximation of an Eras Tour live show. (The director is Sam Wrench, and the footage was captured at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles.) Some of the cutting may be reckless; there’s the occasional WTF? camera angle. But Swift’s command of her audience—and of the moment—is so complete that she instantaneously airbrushes every questionable filmmaking decision into oblivion. The Eras Tour is so named because it hopscotches through Swift’s nearly 20-year career. You could make a gaudy, jumbled show from that wealth of material, or a grand one, and Swift has done the latter. Every number is like a room in a sprawling mansion, executed in just the ri
