You may have heard that the movie version of Cats received terrible reviews. This is not one of them, presumably because I went in expecting the Broadway musical… and got the Broadway musical.
If anything, this star-studded version of Cats was easier to follow than the stage show, because they added bits of dialogue explaining the overall plot. They took some minor liberties by adding motivation for Macavity’s actions (played by the amazing Idris Elba) and replacing Growltiger’s song with light action in the story.
Where the movie stands out is by using technology to do what they can’t do on stage. Jennyanydots’s song typically involves other cats donning mouse and cockroach costumes, but in the movie, they have separate actors for those roles, and more importantly, were able to use technology to show the size difference between the mice, cockroaches, and cats. Of course, this allows for the on screen eating of some of the cockroaches….
Technology combined with good sets were used to good purpose when showing cats in human places; the size difference helps the perspective. A human bed is positively huge, even with three cats on it. (That may be slightly flawed… I can tell you from personal experience that the bed is quite crowded when all three of my cats are on it!)
I gather some people were weirded out by the CGI fur. I’m of the opinion they were watching the wrong thing. The fur was neat, and the color variety amazing amongst the cats, but the impressive use of CGI was the expressiveness of the cats’ ears and tails. Those are hard effects to do on a live stage, so I’m glad they made good use of technology to accent how cats use their entire bodies to express themselves.
All in all, three tails up, one from each cat at my house.