My Very Intelligent And Smart Review Of The Film
Cats (2019) -
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5697572/
with the premise that i'm only
halfway three quarters in, but i think i figured out what the whole kerfuffle was with this film.
As you know, the 2019 film Cats is a film rework of the Andrew Lloyd Webber incredibly-successful musical Cats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(musical)
the plot is almost identical, and the music is also the same. And here is the first issue.
While the critic was almost exclusively with the CGI, i personally like the idea and see why they thought it would work; these aren't cats, as neither are the ones on the stage production - these are people "pretending" to be cats. But, on stage the focus is on the choreography, while on film it is on the songs. And the songs in Cats aren't really good at all.
Compare this to, let's say, Little Shop Of Horrors, or Jesus Christ Superstar. Cats has the quintessential Musical song style - just big band sound changing every few seconds in theme and tone, and the melodic lines are just horrible. Both LSOH and JCS are a bit like that, but overall are far more musical than Cats.
And Cats was always the one musical that pretentious people love; the more pretentious the person, the more they love the musical. Without being face to face with those bulging dancer muscles, you cannot indulge in your middleclass closet fantasy of being an upstanding, heterosexual man.
So, that one target audience is gone.
Those instead who are looking for a simple feelgood film find themselves faced with a dull plot, unlikable characters (mostly, although the fat guy cat is funny), and Rebel Wilson, seriously why would you do that to yourself, nobody likes her.
Anyway, Cats was never a masterpiece, you really need the right target audience. And those few who would like the CGI, they don't like the rest of the film; i'm not fazed at every available hollywood star being crammed into the film, and boy oh boy, you got:
Ian McKellar
Idris Elba
James Corden
Taylor Swift
Mme Judy Dench
But they left the protagonist role to a relatively unknown dancer, Francesca Hayward. Singer J-Hud does a reasonably good job at her part .. and so does pretty much everyone, the problem is just that you can't shift this material away from the stage; if you remove the physical impact of "being there", you are left with the not-quite-good part of Cats, which is EVERYTHING. Cats just doesn't have enough of a good story, interesting characters, or good songs, to stand alone if you remove the dancing, and dancing through film is not the same as dancing in real life.
The sets are pretty damn good. The costumes are debatable, i think if you *could* get these CGI costumes on stage, people wold go mad, but here you get the complaints form that part of the audience that figured that the character of Cats would have been actual f** cats. They work as dancer makeup, though, but that part of the audience that could appreciate then, instead complains for something else - something obvious - that "this isn't theater".
All in all this is not a horrible film, but not great either; you would need to already be a Cats fan to enjoy it, but for regular audiences you would need to massively rework the musical parts into something catchier and suitable for modern audiences.
TLDR: theater people dont like films, film people dont like theater.
6/10 - not as horrible as they said it was.