So I just saw cats and it was...Cats. Now as soon as this trailer came out
It was pretty obvious that nobody wanted this. It is absolutely bizarre
just how much money and star power there is behind this film.
Oscar-winning actors,
Grammy-winning singers, Best Picture and Best Director
winner Tom Hooper- the reason why this is so bizarre is because the
musical is not really that good in the first place.
The story sucks from the get-go,
so you don't really have that much to work with. Pretty much every single song in this movie is just a cat introducing themselves
Hey, it's me. I'm the fat one. Hey, it's me. I'm the other fat one. Hey, it's me
I'm the one that's mischievious. Hey, it's me. I'm the other one that's mischievious. Hey, it's me,
I'm the one that knows magic for some reason. Hey, it's me. I'm the other one
that knows magic for some reason. Each
one of those is a full-length song and the overwhelming majority of these songs
don't really affect the plot of this film whatsoever. It is a nonsense
musical with no real story that just drags on forever and if you're going to do a film adaptation,
you can't really change all the songs.
So you're pretty much just screwed no matter what you do. And even all of this considered, the movie still could have been
somewhat bearable if the character design wasn't the ugliest thing ever created
This is seriously some next-level uncanny valley shit.
Apparently a bunch of morons are blaming furries for this movie when in reality if literally any furry was
consulted about this film, it wouldn't look this fucking disgusting.
Yeah, you know how all the most famous furry artists draw characters with human hands, feet and faces. Yeah, that's furries.
Alright, literally nobody wanted the characters to be designed this way except maybe Tom Hooper
I guess. I have to assume that the biggest reason they kept their human faces is so that the
celebrity actors and singers would be more recognizable in the trailer..? Or perhaps they thought that since the actors in the original stage
musical never performed in full fur suit that they should do this weird hybrid
thing. But not only are the costumes and makeup in the original stage musical a lot less creepy than what appears in this film,
but when you're watching a live stage production, there is a
prerequisite implication that you're leaving a lot up to imagination. When you're watching a live stage production
there is an expectation that the audience members will be filling in some of the blanks. When you adapt something into a film the
Implication is that you are being shown what you're supposed to see. When pretty much the entire movie is animated
anyway, there is no implication that you're supposed to be imagining anything different than what you're seeing.
So whereas this creepy human hand feet and face bullshit might be acceptable in a live stage performance,
it is not in a film.
It looks creepy as fuck, and even more so because they were too lazy to just put people in makeup and decided to outsource
this to
computer animation instead. There were even a couple
moments in the film where the area between where the human face ends and the rest is fur would just like shift over
inconsistently. It was really weird and creepy. If you're going to computer animate everything anyway, then why would you still give them human hands?
There's a part where Ian McKellen starts scratching himself with his hand,
but what he says is that he's scratching himself with his paw, but it's not a paw. It's a hand. It's a fucking hand
it's not a paw,
it's a hand. Not only do the characters look like absolute garbage, but all of the environments do as well.
Everything feels really fake and that even extends to the props. Somehow. I'm not even sure there were props in the film
Maybe it was all just done in a computer.
There's a part where one of them is drinking liquid out of a bottle, and for some reason even the liquid is computer animated and
it looked about as convincing as the liquid that characters would drink at the bar in Mass Effect 2.
It looked like shit. On top of all that the scale of the film was all over the place
There was no consistency to the size of objects in the universe.
They were all just bigger to some degree. In some scenes the cats would seem like they're the same size as regular humans and in
others they would seem as though they're as small as rats.
It seemed really lazy from a production standpoint. There is one thing that I kind of appreciated about this film, believe it or not.
There's a pervasive tendency among modern adaptation of musicals to over modernize the music. Some recent examples would include the
2019 version of "Aladdin" and "The Lion King".
six songs that everybody loves would be butchered with overly poppy rhythms and obscene amounts of auto-tune.
But surprisingly, from what I can tell in this film,
they actually really cared about the music. They kept a lot of old sounding synth tones that I would have expected them to get rid
of. Whether or not
auto-tune was actually used the singing felt like actual singing. A few of the tracks were pretty catchy and I was tapping my toe along
to the rhythm. It's pretty much the one aspect of this film that wasn't horrendous. I just wish that these songs mattered
they're just not really about anything.
I really do not give a shit who these cats are I can only take so many songs about cats
introducing themselves
for no reason in a row. As soon as another track started I would be in immense pain knowing that it would just be the
same shit again. There was nothing to drive forward the plot. I'm not even sure there really was a plot.
Anyway, I guess no one's really watching this movie.
There were literally seven people in the entire theatre when I saw it on opening night,
so I probably don't need to tell you not to watch it,
but just in case I guess just don't watch it. Quite honestly
this might be the ugliest film I have ever seen in my entire life.
You should only see this movie if you want to be annoyed. the experience of watching
this film was more or less a nightmare and I'm giving this one a 2 out of 10
(Captions by Aidan Howe)