Having seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats, when I was younger, the ads for Cats the movie brought back a lot of memories.Most memories from Cats the musical are of my utter confusion while watching it. The dancing and singing were amazing, yet the plot left my entire family confused.
After researching the plot six years later, I finally understand what was going on: Based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot., the musical is about a tribe of “Jellicle” cats who are choosing one cat to be reborn\; all the cats audition for a new life.
After the infamous song “Memories,” the outcast, ugly cat is chosen to be reborn.
This ending was so predictable in the movie, but in the musical I had no idea what was going on and didn’t understand why the ugly cat was praised and celebrated.
The cast of the film includes amazing actors and actresses, including Taylor Swift, James Corden, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, and Rebel Wilson—and that’s only to name a few.
Many critics of the film including myself are confused as to why, with such an amazing cast, the producers chose to use bad CGI instead of makeup to turn the actors into cats.
Why not show off the amazing cast of the movie instead of making nightmare-inducing CGI cats?
A large movie set looming over the “cats” and the CGI furr are really the only things that remind you that you’re watching a movie about animals. The cats even walked upright for the entire movie, so that wasn’t helping to convince me that this was a movie about cats rather than humans.
After watching the movie, I can say that it was better than the tourist-trap musical counterpart. I think it stayed true to being a movie adaptation of the musical. It wasn’t as confusing as the musical and the plot made more sense.
Overall it was better than I thought it would be, but that’s not saying much.
(Note: Sitting in front of my little sister kicking my seat and next to my father humming through all the songs in the movie made my personal experience ten times worse.)
Throughout the movie, I was just waiting for Taylor Swift and James Corden to appear because they were such big parts of the film’s trailer.
But the long-awaited cat version of Taylor Swift in the last bit of the movie was made way too sexy for a CGI humanoid-feline. Her dancing and singing were great, but I was scared by how her cat character looked. Surprisingly, I really liked the magician character Mr. Mistoffelees played by Laurie Davidson.
Unlike the musical, the plot of the film made sense. The individual songs were okay, but the group songs where everybody was singing were terrible and left me feeling scared of the weird humanoid cats.
Rebel Wilson and James Corden’s characters were good, but the rest of the movie was terrible.
Comparing its budget of 95 million US dollars to the 5 million USD budget for Get Out or the 15 million USD budget for Home Alone, Cats the film was a waste of money.
For the cost, I think they should have at least added new songs and put actors in makeup and costumes rather than done awful CGI.
Cats definitely deserved the 2.7 out of ten rating it received from IMDb.