The concert itself was a spectacle, as always with Beyoncé, this time in tandem with Jay-Z. The costumes were beautiful, the song list was great and it was overall extremely entertaining and fun. They really brought it home. It was gritty, sexy, interesting, and kept you rapture for the whole two hours. The short films created especially for the tour were a really nice touch, and were beautifully filmed and worked well with the On The Run theme. Overall loved the tour!
This review is about the HBO Special documentary of the tour. The editing was unbelievably awful, I expected so much more. There's so much cutting, every frame is something different! The film would cut to the crowd then to Beyoncé, then to a screen, then to the dancers, all in half a second. Exhausting to watch, and you end up missing half of the dancing and the short films because the camera cannot stay on one subject for more than one second. Even when the camera is on the short films, instead of just letting us watch them (by putting them directly into the documentary perhaps), it keeps panning back towards the audience and then forward to the screen, back, then forward again. I can't believe this actually turned out to be the final version; such a poor effort considering they had the best in the business at their disposal. It's like the editing team had ADHD. It is so disappointing as I was looking forward to reliving the magic of the concert through this "documentary" (it's just a video of the concert, really), but it just doesn't flow well, and it's incredibly annoying and painful to watch. It really doesn't do justice to the whole event. Exhausting. I would also add that it would have been nice to have some behind the scenes footage, or extra "goodies" so to speak with this, instead of just the concert footage. Maybe a few extra videos, from the initial tour trailer? I just feel like we were short-changed with this HBO Special, that wasn't that special at all.
