Taylor Swift is experiencing even more than her usual degree of media coverage these days. Along with being engaged in an ugly, ongoing public feud with producers that control the rights to her old songs, the popular performer is starring in a new film: an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous broadway hit “Cats” — trailers for which have gone viral for all the wrong reasons.
With the upcoming film’s trailers still thoroughly creeping out would-be viewers, some critics have gotten a chance to see the film in advance — and the early reactions are downright brutal. Reviewers for Variety and The Hollywood Reporter absolutely savage the film. The degree of scorn for the film is so great, that one outlet has even tried to figure out what exactly is fueling the hatred for this potentially epic box office bomb.
Variety’s Peter Debruge predicts that “nine may not be enough lives for some of the stars to live down their involvement in this poorly conceived and executed adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical.”
Debruge slams Director Tom Hooper’s (“The King’s Speech”) film as an “outlandishly tacky interpretation” which he predicts will likely end up being “one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie).”
From the moment a teaser trailer hit the web last summer, the studio has been reeling from the ridicule, seemingly blindsided by harsh attacks on the character designs, the visual effects and the very notion of adapting the hit show. Truth be told, it should have anticipated the backlash. None of it would have mattered if the movie were halfway decent. Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie in which Hooper spends too much energy worrying about whether the technology is ready to accommodate his vision and not enough focusing on what millions love about the musical in the first place.
In a review for The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney declares the film “cat-tastrophic,” the “major misjudgment” of which is in its “central visual concept”:
This Universal release from Working Title and Amblin is hobbled by a major misjudgment in its central visual concept. Once the idea of making Cats as an animated feature was rejected, there presumably were multiple tests to figure out a digital approach to rendering the pusses onscreen. It’s almost unfathomable that this one made it through all the preliminary production meetings without someone sensibly calling a halt to the process by saying, “Wait a minute, those kitties are damn creepy!” And let’s not even get started on the tiny mice with human faces, or the dancing cockroaches, yes, which also serve as crunchy snacks for Rebel Wilson’s Jennyanydots, a zaftig cat with showbiz aspirations who milks strained laughs from countless chunky-girl pratfalls.
Both reviewers stress that it’s not just the look of the characters, it’s also the strained performances and the lack of musical magic in the film that dooms the film.
The overwhelmingly negative response to “Cats” from would-be viewers has been so severe that Screenrant recently felt compelled to unpack the convergence of elements inspiring such a reaction. “All movies receive varying degrees of criticism, but it’s rare for any title to receive the level of pre-release scorn Cats has drummed up,” the outlet noted Wednesday. “It begs the question of why exactly this musical has become such a go-to punching bag for people all over the world.”
Among the reasons for viewers’ universal recoil floated by Screenrant is the “abjectly unnerving” look of the cat people. “Putting recognizably human faces onto humanoid CGI cat bodies creates a sense of visual dissonance that’s distracting rather than helping to immerse prospective viewers into this unique universe of singing-and-dancing kitties.”
Another problem, the outlet suggests, is its overly star-studded cast, that “remind[s] one of the casting choices found in DreamWorks Animation movies like Shark Tale or Monsters vs. Aliens where it’s just a bunch of celebrity voice-overs shoved into one movie regardless of whether or not they actually fit their characters.”
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