It’s not hard to know what you’re going to get with Cats. Universally panned, bombing at the box office, the reputation of this film far precedes itself at this point. Yet, never have I ever been more excited to watch a film as I was while going into Cats. I even flirted with dressing up as one, because . . . why not?
From the first moment to the end credits of this 110-minute disaster, my hands never left my mouth. I was shocked and amazed, and yet delighted that something as purrible as this could possibly be green-lit by a studio, and even have that studio legitimately think they had a glitzy and deserving awards contender on their hands. Yet this film somehow, inexplicably exists, and we are better off for it.
Cats comes to us from director Tom Hooper (bless his heart, he’s done good work before and will make good films again) and is an adaptation of the musical of the same name from playwright and man-who-just-discovered-LSD Andrew Lloyd Weber. The musical is essentially cats introducing themselves for two hours via hit-or-miss numbers, with the final cat (that the rest initially shun because that cat is poor and uncharismatic, but we won’t talk about the message of hating something simply because it’s different) singing the iconic “Memory.”
Tom Hooper’s cat-daptation tries to use CGI to create “digital fur technology” (yes, that is the official PR phrase from Universal) so it doesn’t look like we are looking at people in form-fitting unitards dancing around. Instead, we have to look at some of the worst CGI on the planet.
If you’re looking for a disaster in filmmaking that is so bad it’s kind of fun to watch it implode on itself . . . look no further than Cats. Every aspect of this film is catastrophic, from the editing to the cinematography to the lighting to the sound design to the very un-cat-like performances themselves. The editing varies wildly from number to number. I’m pretty sure I counted something like 25 cuts in less than 30 seconds in one number. That is not how you want to film a musical. Fortunately, “Memory” is almost a single close-up on Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson) in a moment that is totally not a shameless attempt to recreate the “I Dreamed a Dream” sequence in Les Misérables. This sequence is about the only thing of any value Cats has to offer.
How do you butcher the sound design in a musical? I’d rather listen to cats howl than listen to this again. The vocals were clearly added in post-production, so how do you not get the balancing right among the singers, and how do you not balance the singers with the instrumentation properly? These are basic qualities of a movie musical. The lighting is bad. Like the rest of this dumpster fire, the lighting is created via CGI, and it looks like the filmmakers spent their CGI budget on cat fur and forgot that they needed to actually light the cat fur. The sizing of the cats in correlation to the set around them is wildly inconsistent. It’s distracting watching a cat transform from the size of a peanut to the size of a human in correlation to the set around them from one scene to the next.
But the worst offender in all of this is undoubtedly the digital fur technology, and the actors underneath the disturbing CGI. At best, the CGI creates a disturbing cat-human hybrid, a science experiment gone horribly wrong, and at worst we witness an abomination that would make Sega Genesis graphics proud. This was amplified by the cast, which clearly didn’t rehearse together before shooting. Some (like James Corden) are actually trying to act like a cat, others (like Rebel Wilson) are making jokes at the expense of cats, and others (like Ian McKellen) are just walking around like humans, clearly not even trying.
What on earth are Ian McKellen and Judi Dench doing here? They can’t sing, they barely dance, they don’t have a chance to act under all the CGI.
This indecipherable disaster is the very definition of “so bad it’s good,” destined for cult status, a joyous meowntain of cat litter.
