Review: Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour isn’t as awful as the internet makes it out to be

Her latest album landed with a resounding thud. Her ham-fisted attempts at celebrating feminism in its lead single “Woman’s World” fell flat even with feminists. Then her career burned even further upon her re-entry after she blasted off into outer space on the recent celebrity-filled Blue Origin flight.

After all that hubbub, Katy Perry did what pop stars do: She went out on a new tour. And internet haters were undoubtedly going to hate on it.

The backlash against the 40-year-old “Roar” hitmaker was so swift and strong heading into her Lifetimes Tour stop at Target Center on Tuesday night, it seemed all but certain her concert was going to be the biggest crash landing to hit Minneapolis since vegan Jucy Lucys.

Expectations were lowered even further before showtime Tuesday: Setup delays for the stage production forced fans — including thousands of young girls due at school in the morning — to wait outside more than two hours after the advertised 6 p.m. time for doors to open. Ground Control to Major Katy!

Perry made no mention of the delays nor of the widespread backlash against her when she took the stage — only about 30 minutes late, following a very abbreviated appearance by opening act Rebecca Black.

In fact, the pop star acted as if Tuesday’s voyage was entirely smooth sailing. And as Katy Perry concerts go, this one indeed fell right in her usual orbit.

In the 15 years since she became one of pop music’s top hitmakers with her album “Teenage Dream,” Perry’s concert tours have always been over the top, cheeky, corny and a bit crass with a lot of goofy fun. Her last Target Center appearance in 2014, after all, prominently featured a giant inflatable turd emoji.

Yes, Tuesday’s concert was weird even by Perry’s standards. Its Las-Vegas-meets-Battlestar-Galactica stage production was hopelessly bloated and disjointed. The show was built around a dopey video-game story line where fans had to save butterflies and bring humanity back to our modern computer-driven world. Or maybe we were just supposed to dance a lot to save the world? It was hard to follow.

Perry herself was often hard to keep track of. One minute she floated in a purply metallic orb over the heads of fans, as in the opening song “Artificial.” Then she dangled from the roof again, doing high-flying Cirque du Soleil-style stunts midshow in “Nirvana.” Near the end of her two-hour set during “Roar,” she rode a giant flying butterfly all over the arena. As pop stars do.

In the show’s most head-scratching — and viral — montage, she got into a lightsaber duel with some metal-armored aliens and low-rent-looking sandworms during “E.T.” She really should just blast that part of her show off into hyperspace.

Through it all, the crowd of 13,000 or so fans — a respectable school-night turnout — looked to be in on the fun. They even seemed lightly entertained by the forgettable tunes off Perry’s latest album, “143,” including the dizzy, ditzy electro-jam “I’m His, He’s Mine” and the show’s penultimate song “Lifetimes.” The new tunes were often the ones with the most grandiose stage stunts, so that helped.

The concert’s most spacey moments were offset by some sweet bits where Perry did come down to Earth, and even her haters might’ve shown her some love. Like when she introduced herself to fans in attendance under the age of 8 (too young to have ever seen her on tour) as “kind of like Dua Lipa’s aunt.”

During a two-song acoustic set where fans supposedly voted on the songs — never mind the same ones were picked the night before in Chicago — the crowd cheered wildly for one special young fan, Jessica from Owatonna, who was brought on stage by Perry with her mom to help sing “The One That Got Away.” Jessica just plain rocked. Then Perry herself opened up about the joys of becoming a mom in her new ballad “All the Love,” saying, “It was the best decision I ever made in my life.”

Perry also seemed to open up just ever so slightly about the backlash against her before “Part of Me.” She said to the crowd, “It doesn’t matter what they say about me. I know who I am.”

Tuesday’s audience also really seemed to understand who Perry is. For these fans, anyway, this tour definitely wasn’t a game-over situation.