Cats

Cats (2019) is a baffling experience on all accounts. It is a movie that, despite a seemingly glaring visual problem, managed to get made and released without anyone seriously questioning that it looked like a feline-inspired nightmare fever dream.

A few days after its initial release Universal announced that they would be “updating” the effects with the supervision of Director Tom Hooper. Unfortunately for everyone, those “changes” won’t make any difference. The issue stands at the very core of the film’s visual aesthetic. It could only be fixed by redoing it in its entirety. A better move for Universal would be to remove Cats from theaters altogether and apologize for the whole sordid affair. But alas, it still haunts multiplex screens across the county. Only attended by unsuspecting fans of the Broadway musical and ironic hecklers.

Cats, for the uninitiated, tells the story of a tribe of cats and a new arrival who learns about their yearly ball to select one cat to be reborn. Essentially, human/cat hybrids writhe about on the murky set for 100 minutes and sing forgettable songs.  

The film is, from a certain point of view, fascinatingly bizarre. Which is perhaps it’s only redeeming quality. It is not, however, enough to sustain the attention of even the most charitable audience members. It is a confusing, boring, nightmare, that never ups the stakes but consistently ups the weird. Beyond the genuinely unsettling human/cat hybrid CGI, the very writing and scene construction is presented in a way that no movie ever should be.

There is barely any plot to speak of. The characters are thinly veiled stereotypes, that border on offensive. The garbage inspired set design is lit in a way that makes everything worse. The music, which makes up most of the film, often sounds like it was sung by an amateur. Even the famous song “Memory” is ruined, filmed in a way that sucks out what little emotion there might have been.

But the biggest issue, regardless of the original material’s presentation, is that the entire premise of the film is boring. Unsuitable to be adapted in a straight forward way for the big screen. The only saving grace is how inspired and misguided the results are. Only the most radical of adaptation changes could’ve fixed the narrative, or lack there of. But what is most fascinating, is that even the most low-level employee working at Universal could’ve told them that the design was rotten. Someone must’ve said something, and someone else must’ve defended it.

This review has been sponsored by the sunk-cost fallacy.