Review: 'Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour' captures the spectacle and sweat of the star's stadium extravaganza

In the concert movie “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” the (arguably) most famous woman in the world plays guitar and sometimes piano. But the instrument she plays with the most skill, finesse and delight is the audience — nearly 100,000 delirious Swifties filling SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and the countless fans who will fill movie theaters to see this souvenir of her blockbuster tour.

Swift closed out her spring/summer stadium tour at SoFi Stadium in August — and she and director Sam Wrench seem to have cherry-picked the performances from the six shows she performed there. (The two “surprise” songs in her acoustic set come from different nights.) The show is organized by album, though not in chronological order.

Wrench presents the show in much the same way a fan in the stadium would see it — no backstage costume changes, no behind-the-scenes warmups, no interviews with fans before the show. The camera comes in from above, hones in on the stadium, and just like that, Swift and her backup band, vocalists and dancers are launching into “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince,” the first of six cuts from her 2019 album, “Lover.” 

The production design is off-the-charts in the “Lover’ section, with a three-story office set for her feminist anthem “The Man,” which morphs into a rainbow-colored house interior for the whimsical pro-LGBTQ song “You Need to Calm Down.”

After “Lover,” Swift — looking athletic in a sequined body suit, the first of many costumes she wears through the show — shifts gears to the “Fearless” section, taking on the title track of that 2008 album and two of her early pop hits, “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story.” Then she jumps to 2020’s “Evermore,” where the staging goes from the simple (“Champagne Problems” has just her at a moss-covered piano, with the band quietly hidden) to the theatrical, enacting a dinner-table breakup for “Tolerate It.”

The light-industrial grind of 2017’s “Reputation” and the girls-night-out jams of 2012’s “Red”— with the hits “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” — are somewhat awkwardly separated by the swoony “Enchanted”, the one song from her 2010 album “Speak Now” (“Enchanted”). The “Red” segment ends with what’s easily Swift’s most powerful solo piece, her 10-minute bad-boyfriend masterpiece “All Too Well.” 

The back end of the show luxuriates through several tracks from her semi-experimental 2020 album “Folklore,” four chart-toppers from her 2014 album “1989” (the staging on “Blank Space” is hilarious), a two-song acoustic set (where Swift liked to mix it up every night) before launching into the grand finale — seven songs from her most recent album, “Midnights.”

The movie clocks in at two hours and 48 minutes — including a song over the closing credits. That’s a bit shorter than the concert itself, I’m told, and based on setlists I’ve seen online, I could tell you the songs that got cut. (Wrench also cuts out some of the costume-change transitions.) Those songs aren’t particularly missed, because Swift & Co. are giving so much through the show that any fan will be satisfied.

That’s the point of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” movie, isn’t it? This is a keepsake, a memento of a tour that entertained a few million people across the country — the equivalent of a selfie and a T-shirt to remember the moment, or a bit of tour merchandise ordered online by those not fortunate enough to live near an NFL-sized stadium or wealthy enough to make the trip and secure the tickets.

There are other venues if you want to hear Swift being introspective behind the scenes. (I recommend director Lana Wilson’s 2020 documentary “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana,” streaming on Netflix.) Here, you get precisely what it says on the box: Taylor Swift in concert, dressed in glittering glory, singing the songs her fans love in a spectacularly staged production. As Swift sings in “Mastermind,” one of the last numbers of the night, “It was all my design” — and a brilliant one at that.

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‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’

★★★1/2

Opens Thursday, October 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and suggestive material. Running time: 168 minutes.