Cats: A Computer Generated Fever Dream that Terrifies and Traps the Audience

Cats has been one of the longest running broadway musicals around. It started in the early eighties and is still going strong. So you would think a movie adaptation would be successful and loved. There was great success with the recent movie adaptation of Les Miserables. So when the Cats trailer came out people were shocked and horrified by what they saw. So what went wrong?

The way they filmed Cats was not traditional motion capture suits, but the actors faces are superimposed on computer generated cats, and it looks terrifying. The computer effects are inconsistent, the ears on the cats don’t match the actors eyes and feelings. The ears move independently from the actors and it’s very noticeable. The faces are just so off putting, especially when the characters look directly at the camera often and it’s like they are looking into the audiences soul. The faces are incredibly distracting. There’s one cat character who has a collar and it is so poorly rendered that it is sometimes in the characters neck. There is also a few shots with matte paintings of London that just look atrocious.

This movie doesn’t really explain the plot as well as it should. The audience gets bits and pieces of the plot. The biggest problem here is that the writers assume everyone has seen the original play so they feel they don’t have to give a lot of exposition. The audience has to decipher the plot from the five minutes of actual dialogue in the movie. It’s just musical number after musical number without giving the audience anytime to catch their breath. The audio mixing in the beginning of the movie is terrible. The score and music are so loud that the audience can barely hear the actors singing for the first few songs.

Cats has an allstar cast including Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellan, Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo, and Ray Winstone. A few of them are Oscar winning actors and after this movie, they should give them back. The acting is over the top and ridiculous. Rebel Wilson and James Corden are the butt of many fat jokes. No one is “good” in this movie. There aren't nearly as many cat puns as I expected and I was disappointed. This movie also has a lot of sexual overtones for cat people. It’s also hard to believe that no humans see or hear these cats sing and dance. Normally I wouldn't complain about something like this but the movie establishes that there are humans in this world.

There is a lot of campy value in Cats. Watching this is like an acid trip. It might actually improve the movie to be high while watching this. This movie is like the equivalent of being dragged down a street covered in broken glass while being on acid. It truly is a horrifying experience but it should be seen to be believed. I recommend Cats for comedic value only, but if you’re a fan of the broadway show it probably isn’t for you. 🍔