Nothing can prepare you for the faces. You can read a hundred pieces about Cats, director Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beloved-ish musical about cats having a singing competition, and nothing, nothing you read about it could prepare you for the pure, unnerving spectacle of seeing a computer trying to affix human faces to a fucked up, motion-capture cat with human body parts, a tail, and a big human nose, sitting right there in the middle of a cat’s head, sitting on human shoulders, doing dancing routines in a world scaled to cat size.
Sometimes, the faces look… fine? Functional? You’ll see Dame Judi Dench in a close-up, and it’s makeup, like a Star Trek alien, except she’s singing about being a cat instead of engaging in high-level diplomacy with Jean-Luc Picard. But the second anyone starts moving their body, the effect goes haywire. The face always seems a step or two behind the moving body—a human visage temporarily displaced from the twisted cat demon. Especially in a movie theater, watching on a high-definition projector, your attention affixed to the horror show going on in front of you, you can’t help but notice. This movie would work better if, instead of being a 2.35:1 monstrosity getting pumped into your face, it was pan-and-scanned to 4:3, and played on a worn-out tube TV with a reddish tint. The lost detail would subject you to less of these uncanny eyesores that are trying to pass for, um, sexualized cat people.
It’s honestly a miracle a movie this twisted got made, in a world where every movie that costs more than $50 million is engineered for maximum inoffensiveness. It’s such a horrible idea, stem to stern, made even more baffling by the number of times they must have looked over the technology tests and assumed it was going to look better than that, sooner or later.
Now, look: Cats is a bad musical in and of itself, the product of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s diseased mind, the nadir of musical theater as an art form. For those who aren’t familiar with the plot of the movie: There are these cats that live in England called jellicle cats, and they all do musical routines for the head cat, named Old Deuteronomy, and the best one will get to be reincarnated, to try and live its life over. They have horrible names like Rumpleteazer, Rum Tum Tugger, and Skimbleshanks.
It was extraordinarily popular, especially on Broadway, where it ran for nearly 18 years, its initial run closing in 2000. Its enduring popularity was the first sign that this world was headed straight to hell, that the excesses of the West were coming home to roost, and that we would soon be consumed by global warming, violence, and incompetence. Trump plays “Memory,” the showstopper, at his rallies, because New York in the ’80s was the last time he was alive in any real sense.
There are also performances in this movie. Some are not that bad. Ian McKellen plays an old cat actor, that’s kind of fun. Rebel Wilson seems to be having a good time. Jennifer Hudson sings “Memory,” a song I personally dislike (I sang it it middle-school choir), and is a professional at these kinds of things.
But the rest of them. Eugh boy. Idris Elba, Stringer Bell himself, plays Macavity, a villain cat, about as hammily as one possibly could. Taylor Swift, who co-wrote a pretty bad song with Webber for the movie, plays Macavity’s Manson girl, who drugs all the other cats with catnip, in a scene that is Lynchian in its sadistic strangeness. Judi Dench tries a little too hard to make Old Deut dignified—an impossible task considering her drifting face has been affixed to a CGI cat body. Makes you a bit embarrassed for her for even trying. Jason Derulo’s turn as Rum Tug Tugger is deeply depraved. Steven McRae, a ballet dancer in his feature-film debut, plays Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, a train-themed cat.
I cannot possibly express how much I loathe the railway cat.
Source: Why Taylor Swift’s ‘Cats’ Is the Death Knell of the Hollywood Musical