A few months ago, my sister and I decided it would be fun to watch the movie “Cats” and make fun of it, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. She was busy with the Ontario provincial election – she works for a member of provincial parliament – so we didn’t get around to it until this past Saturday. At 5 PM, my sis showed up with her family and dog in tow, bearing wings and ribs. I had the nachos ready, and we all assembled before the TV as I fired up “Cats” on Netflix.
Now, if you are unfamiliar with “Cats,” allow me to explain. I am sure you know “Cats” is a very, very famous and popular Broadway-style musical extravaganza, one of the many Andrew Lloyd Webber stage spectaculars that make kazillions of dollars. It doesn’t really have much of a plot – it is, weirdly, “inspired” by a bunch of silly, fun poems T.S. Eliot wrote about cats – but here it goes: a bunch of cats are in this little clique called the Jellicle Cats. Every year they assemble for a party and one is chosen to literally die and go to heaven, which, for reasons I don’t understand, is called the Heavyside Layer. One by one, the audience is introduced to a series of oddly named cats; there are no Snowballs or Shadows here, they all have weird names like Mr. Mistofelees, Skimbleshanks, and Old Deuteronomy. One cat, Grizabella, used to be popular but now she’s old and mangy so all the other cats hate her. The antagonist is a tricky cat called Macavity who briefly abducts Old Deuteronomy, the cat that decides who wins the contest, but they get the old cat back and when Grizabella sings a pretty song, she gets chosen and goes to heaven. That’s basically it.
“Cats” is, in theater history, one of the most important things ever, because it kind of kicked off the “megamusical” trend where musicals are really huge productions with enormous effort put into set design and effects, and they are marketed to make gigantic truckloads of money. I’ve seen the stage production and, honestly, it’s very impressive, even though it has basically no story. A proper mounting of this musical requires singers and dancers of exceptional skill and it really is something to behold. So you can understand why they did a movie version. And so, two nights ago, I watched it to see how bad it was.
How bad was it, you ask?
“Cats” was the worst movie I have seen in twenty years. Maybe ever. I can honestly think of only two movies I’ve ever seen that were this bad; “Battlefield Earth” and “Highlander II,” and there is a reasonable argument to be made that “Cats” is worse. Literally everything about the movie is awful. Every single decision they made was bad. It was genuinely amazing; I found myself open-mouthed in shock that a real movie studio, staffed with professionals whose job it is to make movies, would allow this fiasco to be seen by the public.
Where to begin? Let’s start with the cat effects. The stage musical was famous for the costumes, which transformed the actors into unique-looking cats. The movie (directed by the previously well regarded Tom Hooper) instead elects to use CGI to turn humans into cats. The effect is, to say the least, incredibly disturbing and weird, diving into some weird place adjacent to the uncanny valley. The actor’s cat bodies just look odd, especially the ears and tails, which are animated to look like real cats’ ears and tails but often seem weirdly disconnected and just distracting. The body effects basically just amount to fur; for reasons I cannot explain, they deciding to still have the women have breasts, which just looks so fucking weird.
More disturbing, though, is that they really don’t give anyone a cat FACE. The makeup in a stage production really makes people look like cats, but in the movie, for most actors they just had a few whiskers added. They still have otherwise human faces, more or less. The most weird and distracting part of this is that everyone still have a fully human nose; they don’t even color in the end of it, the way any child pretending to be a cat for Hallowe’en would.
What I find baffling about the cat effects is that when the first glimpses were seen by the public the reaction was one of near-universal horror, but they made only the tiniest improvements. I don’t for the life of me understand why they didn’t just go one way or the other – either put the cast into cat suits, like in the stage show, or REALLY cat it up in CG, and give them cat noses, fangs, yellow eyes, the whole nine yards. “Let’s give ‘em cat suits in CGI but keep their faces human” was a baffling choice. Oh, and they have human feet. Some wear shoes.
The problem with the CGI cat effects is exacerbated by the fact that the CGI in general is just incredibly bad. Apparently this movie cost about $100 million to make, and I can only assume they spend $99.8 million on salaries and craft services and got Crazy Bill’s Discount House of Special Effects And Secondhand Furniture to do the visual effects work. It is mind-blowingly bad. People sometimes float an inch off the floor, things in the background look cheap and fake, and the cat outfit effects are just incredibly inconsistent.
Almost everything in the movie is CGI; it barely qualifies as a live action film. There are some practical props if someone has to pick something up. Amazingly, they fucked that up too. A thing about “Cats” the musical is that objects on the set are scaled in such a manner as to make them look proportional to the cast if they were cats, not humans. In “Cats” the movie, they sometimes do this, buuuut sometimes not. Sometimes object size makes sense relative to a cat, sometimes it seems off. Sometimes the same prop or effect appears to change size in the same scene. Sometimes they just forgot to scale things at all.
Now, a word about the cast before we get into the music; there are a lot of talented people in this cast. You’ve got Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, and some musician types; Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo, Rebel Wilson. Francesca Heyward, a newbie who plays the sort-of-protagonist, is a talented ballerina. The lesser known faces are mostly talented song and dance types. James Corden is okay when used right.
The decision to put people like Dench, McKellen and Corden in key roles, though, was a horrifying error, because they CAN’T SING. To account for that, their songs are changed, making them deliberately easier and, in the case of Dench and McKellen, allowing them to speak a lot of their words. Then, for what reason I don’t understand, a lot of the other songs are altered in similar ways too. The timing often seems off, in fact, and the vocal position in the sound mix goes in and out. Rebel Wilson is horrifying in her big number; I am told she can sing but you’d never know here. She’s sub-high-school-performance.
It’s clear Tom Hooper doesn’t really get musicals, and doesn’t get Cats in particular, which is funny because it’s the simplest story in the world. At one point in the middle of Act 2, Grizabella recoils when Victoria tries to touch her… which is quite literally the opposite of her character’s point, which is she WANTS to be touched. I mean, the whole point of Grizabella is to sing “TOUCH ME” in “Memory” and so… like, this movie is so stupid. It’s basically the only emotional arc the musical has and they forgot it. The character of Victoria itself, made 40 times more important in the film, makes no sense, either.
Oh, and dancing. A critical part of Cats is the dancing, which has to be spectacular. It’s a big part of the show. In the movie, it’s very clear Hooper doesn’t get dancing. The camera is all over the goddamn place, zooming in and out, violating the 180 rule, moving around like someone on meth trying to mow a lawn, so you can never sit still to watch a dancer move in a given space. Fuck it’s bad.
Really, nothing I can write here can really tell you bad this was. There is a Gestalt awfulness to this; you can’t quite explain point by point how sickening the overall effect is. It made me want to barf. I will never, ever see a movie this bad again. It’s not possible.
