Cats (2019)- Uhhh, what am I looking at?

[Graystripe2000]

An upcoming live-action film, releasing the same day as Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker BTW, based on a broadway musical. 

The plot is about a tribe of cats called the “Jellicles” who, over the course of a single night, must make "the Jellicle choice" and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.

Trailer is below. I haven’t seen the trailer itself but the screenshots I’ve seen of the cats is, uhhhh, interesting, to say the least. 

 

[Blue Blood]

The stage play was always people dressed up in cat-like costumes. This isn't all that different. It looks a little weird, but I actually think it's fine. It's rather true to the source material.

[DabigRG]

Don't go backstage with them. 

 

Seriously though, wtf? 

[Chili Dawg]

This is horrifying

[Diogenes]

17 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

The stage play was always people dressed up in cat-lije costumes. This isn't all that different. It looks a little weird, but I actually think it's fine. It's rather true to the source material.

Yeah that's pretty much how I feel. I mean, I don't like it, it's a bit offputting at times, but I'm not feeling the intense shock/disgust that a lot of people seem to.

Movie Sonic was way more horrifying than this.

[AdventChild]

Those faces...Why do they still have human like uncanny valley faces? They should've just made it more cat like via Swat Kats.

Heck, I'd rather have it fully animated like the sadly canned Steven Spielberg one. Just look at the concept art:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/stunning-concept-art-for-spielbergs-animated-cats-movie-1599739506

Spoiler

 

[Graystripe2000]

New trailer.

 

[Graystripe2000]

The reviews are in. Is it as bad as we were expecting? Nope. It’s WORSE. Currently at an 8%. Triple OUCH!

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cats_2019 

EDIT: Now it’s at 15%.

[Milo]

honestly, those reviews have convinced me to go see it.

blockbuster movies that are total trainwrecks only come around every few years, and this looks like the next inductee of that hall of infamy.

star wars can go wait in line i'm seeing this movie first

[buranflakes]

Wow, guess they couldn’t translate the long running success of the Broadway show into the silver screen huh? But yeah, could be fun in an Ed Wood sort of way lol

[AdventChild]

Some more bad news for the movie, not just low negative reviews and dismal box office numbers. This is probably the first time we have a Day One Patch not for a video game but for a movie as they're trying to fix the special effects/graphics and have a digitally enhanced version for the theaters after its released. It's like if the Sonic Movie still have that horrid design upon release and then Paramount releases the movie with the redesign after the box office weekend, ripping you off to buy another ticket just to see a slightly better version.

As the vid says, it gives a worrying precedent if future movies to go along route that the VG industry took. Probably even releasing a version A and B of the same movie at the same time but with altered scenes or even a different ending. It's like buying a movie only to realize that the Bonus DVD/Blu-Ray features are not on it and you have buy a separate disc at the same price. What's next? Movie equivalent of DLC and loot boxes? This could be Hollywood's final nail in the coffin if it goes down this route.

[Milo]

I saw the movie earlier today.

...oof.

That was kinda mostly bad. And not in the so-bad-its-good/fun-to-watch-bad I was hoping for when the (more) vitriolic reviews come out, it's just mostly-weird-and-kinda-uncomfortable bad. It looked like had the chance to go the former route because the first-third is honestly kinda surreal with some of the performances (although that's marred by some really painful cat puns and attempts at slapstick with certain characters), but that melts away into a kinda fun second-third, and a final third that has one actually good performance but comes full circle into a bizarre fourth wall-break packaged into a final song that was hard to sit through.

The CG/appearances of the cats I was mostly able to tolerate (although I think my screening was the original, I'm pretty sure I saw plenty of hands that were missing fur textures in the cut that I saw), the bigger culprit was that this crew literally tried to film a stage play (a near-ceaseless string of assorted songs without much, if any, of an underlying story) as is and projected that on the movie screen. There are some attempts at some sort of arc (Victoria/the new cat wanting to belong) and conflict (Macavity wanting to become the chosen Jellicle cat and ascend, and kidnapping other characters to achieve this goal) but none of them are honestly developed beyond their most basic motivations. It feels like the most literal and worst-case example of taking something from one medium and bringing it to another without making any meaningful changes to properly translate it. This is like if Robert Zemekis's mo-cap animation studio didn't die after Mars Needs Moms! bombed at the box office and a musical was their next project.

Somehow it made the new Star Wars film look like a competent movie just for the sheer fact it tried to tell a story, even if it was a completely scattershot and thrown-together-at-the-wall story. Maybe there's a way to make an entire film that virtually has no real story and make it work, but Cats definitely wasn't it. In regards to ratings, this movie is just barely skimming by on a rental; some of the songs/performances and the sets are just barely keeping me from dismissing it as trash.