This week I checked out the musical movie genre and watched Cats. Going into this I knew that the movie had terrible reviews and only had a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. This might have led me to have a personal bias before I set out to watch the movie, but I tried to push those thoughts out of my head. My mom saw Cats on Christmas, but I decided to skip out. She thought it was good movie, but then again, she doesn’t have the best taste in movies.
I grabbed the snacks and sat down to prepare to watch Cats. Within the first couple minutes, I was already confused. There was about zero dialogue in the first ten minutes. I believe that the first couple scenes of a movie are crucial to set the plot and introduce any main characters. I was not getting any of that from Cats. The whole movie they barely talked without singing. I like to think that I enjoy musicals, but this movie might’ve changed my mind. Every single scene, back to back, was filled with songs. Songs that you really had to sit there and pay attention to and listen to every single lyric to understand what was going on in the scene. Although the music attempts to have a fun energetic vibe, it is overall nonsensical and not enjoyable. When the music ceased, nonstop cat puns and hissing were weaved into each scene; “cats got her tongue”, “cat’s out of the bag”, it never ended.
The first scene, the main character is quite literally dumped into the scene. The world the movie is set in, is not introduced. I found myself struggling to understand the dimension the cats were living in. Were they the only ones living in the town? Were there any humans around? How did they all get there? I had many questions!
Another question I had was about the look of the cats themselves. Some of the cats were wearing accessories like necklaces, earrings or hats, while others had full outfits complete with shoes and another portion weren’t even wearing anything at all. Does that mean that the cats who aren’t wearing anything are naked the whole film? The CGI look of the cats was unsettling as well. The cats had cat ears, whiskers and tails, yet they had human faces. It was very unsettling; just check out the gif below!
Although, there were many many negatives, I did have a few positives. I enjoyed Taylor Swift’s scene where her Cats character, Bombalurina, is hanging out above the cats laying on a moon and sprinkling cat nip onto the crowds below. The cats got high on the cat nip while she had a nice musical number with lots of backup dancers. I also liked the main character’s, Victoria the White Cats, dances. Francesca Hayward is a trained ballet dancer so her dance scenes were fluid, graceful, and overall beautiful.
Overall, I’d give this movie a solid 3 cats out of 10. It didn’t WOW me, I found myself hating that they sang almost every single line and the CGI/animation made me uncomfortable.
🐱🐱🐱(3)/10
Movies with Mendelsohn 