Everyone’s Avatar
So many braces.
Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour LIve in 3D
Directors: James Cameron, Billie Eilish
Starring: Billie Eilish, James Cameron, Finneas O’Connell
Hong Kong • 1hr 54mins
Opens Hong Kong May 7 • I
Grade: B
At the risk of enraging Billie Eilish fans – though by their very tolerant and supportive definition they wouldn’t come for me like Swifties or the Beyhive – Eilish, as a performer is… fine? Sit down and listen to her music (and I do, I like her too) and what you’re confronted with is a whispy, barely there vocal presence, whisping out some very on-the-nose lyrics. She’s a vanguard in her way; more Tori Amos than Courtney Love in her rage, and that’s fine. Yet there’s a uniformity, a sameness, to her music in tone and tempo that probably makes her popularity inscrutable to some – as in anyone over 30. That line up there about the braces? No shade. It’s just an easy way to explain just how youthful (most in) Eilish’s audience is.
It’s one of the reasons her unfussy, lyrically naked songs appeal so broadly and so deeply, and it’s something (da fuq?) James Cameron (!) captures in Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D, a pseudo-chronicle of Eilish’s last tour. This isn’t the first time Eilish has picked a director seemingly out of left field: she worked with Robert Rodriguez on Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles (2021). But her first concert pic was with specialised music director Sam Wrench (2023’s Billie Eilish: Live at the O2), who also made music films for Lizzo, BTS, Brandi Carlile, Sabrina Carpenter, Andrea Bocelli and a little thing called Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. Masterful as he is, Cameron has a long way to go to hit the heights of the GOAT concert films, among them Alek Keshishian’s Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1984) or the gold standard, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), and falls somewhere in average territory. Fans, however, should be beyond tickled. They may burst into tears.
Watery, but not Avatar
Shot in Manchester, Hit Me Hard and Soft is an immersive 3D US$20 million (sofa change for Cameron) document that comes up to the line of really telling us more about who Eilish is – but never steps over it. Some of its best bits come in Cameron and Eilish’s very cursory chats (Cameron isn’t a great documentarian of people), and when editor Ben Wainwright-Pearce sprinkles in moments that offer a brief peek at Eilish’s thoughts on her relationship to her own persona. These bits are interesting because she’s engaging, and her appreciation and identification with her audiences feels genuine. She doesn’t mind the scratches she gets from the crowds, “I was that fan once”, and her quip about doing her own make-up and hair is refreshingly un-corporate. A concert film is as much about myth-making as it is about music, but Eilish’s DGAF myth feels more authentic than Swift’s does in The Eras Tour, which this will unfairly be compared to. It’s not hard to find the Black, brown, fat, depressed, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent fans singing along in Hit Me Hard and Soft because Eilish’s work talks to many of them (their words) and she embraces all their iterations.
And the fans make up a huge part of the narrative, sometimes too much. After that staple of the concert film, a time-lapse building the stage sequence, the show at Co-op Live starts with Eilish rising from a platform to “CHIHIRO” and launching into a hard-soft, colour-coded show that checks off all the boxes. There’s no reason for her ever to have vocal problems because the audience does half the singing. All the hits are represented, with “Your Power”, “Wildflower” and a mesmerising performance of “when the party’s over” where Eilish demands silence – and gets it – standing out. There’s an intimate couple of songs with her beloved brother Finneas O’Connell, and she finally rocks out on “Happier than Ever”, whose line “Don’t waste the time I don’t have” is admittedly a chef’s kiss line, and “Birds of a Feather”.
The Cameron of it all comes in how he captures the light and shadow, shifting monochromes and swirling – but not distracting – camera work (by DOP John Brooks) at scale, totally vibing with watery motif of “blue” and “Ocean Eyes” and somehow making a arena show feel intimate (the Co-op’s capacity: 23,000). The nearly perfect marriage of Cameron-style visuals and Eilish’s distinct low energy, erm, power come off best on “The Greatest”, after a series of first-person POV flourishes and wide shots that establish the show’s scope. Eilish herself states early on that the setlist would progress by mood and hue, and if anyone can make sense of light, exploit it and translate it to a moving image story it’s Cameron.
And so Hit Me Hard and Soft frequently does feel as immersive as Cameron and Eilish hope it will. It probably didn’t have to be shot in 3D, but there’s an undeniable arena vibe and image depth that puts you in the stalls – assuming your theatre has the volume up loud enough (mine did not). That immersion, however, comes at the price: fan inclusion, of which there is just too much of at times. We know Eilish’s music is important to her faithful; there are plenty of candid “Tell me what you think” moments to support that, and Eilish probably wanted to recognise her impact. But there are too many cut-aways to weeping fans and audio isolation of sing-alongs. If you’re one of them, you don’t need to see it. You’re here to experience it and you don’t need help “getting” Eilish.