Upon the movie’s opening night Friday, Dec. 20, the movie was a failure. It lost 90 million dollars in its first weekend in box office and was greatly disliked by audience and critic viewers alike. I have never heard of such widespread and overwhelming hate directed at a movie, so I knew I needed to go see what all the hype was about.  

I went into the movie understanding full well that what I was seeing was not well received. What I was not expecting was for the it to just be flat out boring. The plot in this movie just doesn’t exist. It surrounds this cult like group of characters known as the Jellicle Cats and almost half of the movie is just song after song of each cat introducing themselves to the newest cat, Victoria (Francesca Hayward).  

Then, the head of the Jellicle Cats, Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) must make the Jellicle Choice every year, in which she chooses a cat to go to a happier place, which in my mind equates to something similar to a ritual sacrifice. You are supposed to follow this journey through the eyes of Victoria, who in the opening scene is thrown like a sack of trash into this “Cats” universe. She learns about this universe as you do.  

The villain in this movie, Macavity (Idris Elba) is trying to capture and cheat the choice by eliminating all other cats from being the chosen one. He also has magical power that can allow him to teleport, unlike any other cats in the story. If he really wanted to go to a higher place, why didn’t he just teleport himself there? How did he accumulate these powers? The holes in this storyline are astounding.  

Not only was the plot extremely confusing and dry, but the effects used in the movie are beyond uncomfortable to watch. They had about seven months total to completely edit on the cat look on each character, because upon filming they were not in any sort of furry costume. How the director thought this would be enough time to use state of the art technology and completely edit each cat into the film is beyond me. For the first time in history, the film played at the premiere of the movie was edited at being shown, because there were mistakes in the CGI.  

The actual cats themselves are horrible to look at. The furry look only extends so far, because these cat-human hybrids have human hands and feet, so it literally just looks like some sort of human with cat skin. There were several scenes that were horrible and awkward to look at, because of how weird the cats looked and moved. The female cats also seemed to have breasts, to add to the oddity of the look.   

From start to finish, the music, acting and plot were terrible in “Cats”. The original musical on Broadway was not well-liked at all, so the fact that the adaptation into movie was chosen, over the many plays on Broadway that are of actual quality and substance, does not make sense at all. At this point, the fact that the entertainment industry decided that this was worthy of becoming a major motion picture, is extremely disappointing. Unless you want a good nap, do not go see this film.