‘BILLIE EILISH – HIT ME HARD AND SOFT: THE TOUR (LIVE IN 3D)’: The Fan Service

Any concert film worth its salt has one job: sound good. Sound design is the whole game, the thing that has to envelop you, and Billie Eilish has said she wants Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) to hit every sense at once. But the sound should remain the most important detail. However, the live concert event coming to multiplexes around the world, co-directed by Eilish and James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron), is so enamored with Eilish’s fandom that it lets them inside the mix. Her gorgeous vocals are routinely steamrolled by fans singing along, and by endless cutaways to screaming, crying, fawning fans singing along. Whatever intimacy this 3D experience was supposed to conjure leaks out a little more with every reaction shot and grows increasingly cringy each time a fan singalong swallows up the Eilish’s vocals in the sound mix.

If you’re like me, having to hear your weepy arena seat neighbor belt out an off-key rendition of whatever ballad at full volume is not the highlight of a concert. A filmed version should allow you to escape this. Instead, this is exactly where the film from Eilish and Cameron homes in: the fan experience. Part of this means getting up close and personal with what Eilish means to her fans and what they mean to her, as glimpsed in some sparse BTS shots. But by and large what this means is just a a lot of fans screaming every single lyric along. For this viewer, that translates to a film that aggrandizes the very worst parts of being at a concert and cranks it up to eleven. If any of this sounds less than ideal, you’d probably be better served popping in your AirPods Pros and putting on one of Eilish’s albums in lossless Dolby Atmos than venturing to the theater. I can all but guarantee that it’ll sound ten times better than whatever it is we have here.

At first I wondered if the painful sound mix – and I’m not just being facetious, the audio is at times nothing less than painful – was just a function of an older theater with wildly mediocre sound, the kind of room I would never recommend for a concert film regardless. But I almost suspect an IMAX experience with Dolby surround sound would only make it worse. The fan singing already feels like 50% of the mix, sitting as front-and-center as Eilish’s own vocals. Sharper sound projection wouldn’t fix that; it would just dial the shrieks cringe factor up further.

Setting aside for a moment the dreadful sound design, great concert films shouldn’t require enduring fandom as a prerequisite. I think of Stop Making Sense, where one of my first deep encounters with the Talking Heads turned me into a fan inside of ninety minutes, swept up by the enormity of the performances and its unabashedly dorky but nevertheless cool aura. Here, despite expensive and impressive sets, plenty of pyrotechnics, and a never-ending light show, the experience still feels distant. Far away. The intent, I think, is to use fan reaction as the entry point, to let us see Eilish through their eyes. The effect though seems to be mostly the opposite. It pushes you out. It doesn’t help that Eilish isn’t the most acrobatic performer to begin with; she mentions a sprained ankle limiting her mobility, and there are stretches where she’s just sitting and singing, which clashes awkwardly against the whole James-Cameron-Shooting-This-In-3D!! pitch. The final product feels confused, and confusing.

Just to contextualize for the likely outraged readers calling for my critic card to be revoked for my decidedly not-positive take on Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), I should flag how much I admire Billie Eilish as a musician. I’ve listened to her albums countless times – and struggle to name an artist who better takes advantage of the dimensionality of audio projection like Atmos – and think she is a genuinely singular star within the industry, unapologetically herself in everything from her fashion choices to her music to how she shows up as a young woman in an industry often destructive to young women. A lot of mainstream pop doesn’t work for me, but I’ve been drawn to Eilish’s work for years, which is what drew me to this live concert to begin with – something I typically avoid. As a filmed live event, though, this didn’t just feel like a degraded concert experience – it felt alienating. I understand that I may not be the primary target audience, which, fine, I’m admittedly not a super fan. But the emphasis on obsessive fandom, on fans crying all over themselves and sleeping outside for days just to catch a glimpse of Billie, didn’t pull me in – it made the experience feel more distant and otherworldly but not in an intriguing way.

Eilish’s latest creation also suffers in the shadow of Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, the terrific Apple documentary that dug into her origins and gave you a real sense of where she came from – that almost Cinderella overnight transformation. That film wove musical footage together with behind-the-scenes home videos of her writing the songs many now know by heart, and the combination was genuinely powerful. Here, the behind-the-scenes material feels rote. Nothing is especially specific. Nothing is especially revealing. Swap in any pop star and most of the behind-the-scenes material would play identically. There’s presumably some intrigue in tracking how far Eilish has come from where she was at in Blurry, but I didn’t feel it. I was waiting for the lights to come up.

The film is at its best in its smallest moments. Eilish grabs a handheld camera and sings directly into it, conjuring a kind of intimacy a concert can’t actually give you, and which this format should own. Better still is the sequence where she builds “When the Party’s Over” from scratch, looping harmony on top of harmony and asking the audience to please be quiet so she can do it. For the first and only time, the roar drops to a hush, and you can finally hear her voice clean. It is the best stretch of the movie, and it is the best stretch precisely because the film stops doing the thing it spends the rest of its runtime doing: letting fandom overwhelm the experience. Everything else looks like footage you could catch on a Jumbotron from your seats in the nosebleeds. There’s nothing here that says: this is the definitive movie version of the concert. And while the poster’s claim to “reinvent” the concert experience, this still just feels like a concert caught on film. Something that will always pale in comparison to the real thing. Especially when you add in fan echoes screaming along, drowning out the artist you actually came to hear.

Billie diehards will likely nevertheless go gaga for this theatrical experience. It is, after all, designed to be as fan-servicing as possible. But anyone outside the inner-inner circle of Eilish fandom will likely feel held at arm’s length, if not actively shoved away, and almost all of that traces back to the sound design. Pull the fawning, sing-screaming out of the mix and you could discover something intimate, provocative, enticing. As is, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) takes the worst part of going to a concert, the part most of us are quietly enduring, and turns it into the main attraction. And then puts it in 3D.

CONCLUSION: Even the presence of James Cameron behind the camera and Billie Eilish belting her heart out cannot turn this filmed arena tour experience into anything more than blatant fan service with bad sound design dominated by shrieking fans.