Cats
Directed by Tom Hooper
- fantasy
- comedy
- drama
The story
A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life.
What it’s like
Lurid, uncanny digital fur over sets that look like a stage dressed as a bombed-out London street, with junkyards, rooftops and a huge tyre-scrap playground under a sodium-orange and violet glow. The camera swoops, cranes and cuts fast through big ensemble numbers, and the dance is kinetic and loose, so the frame often feels crowded and slightly unreal. The score is Andrew Lloyd Webber's sung-through musical, with bright pop-theatrical arrangements, lots of rhythmic chanting, and one ballad that slows everything down. The vibe is bizarre, campy and earnest in equal measure, the kind of baffled, so-bad-it's-good spectacle that suits a loud Friday night with friends or a comfort rewatch when you want to laugh at it and sing along. Over one night of cats gathered to choose a member to be reborn, the arcs are simple: a lost outsider finding a place, and a chorus of eccentrics performing their personalities. Intensity is low: mild peril and menace, one villain with a sinister streak, some suggestive, touchy-feely dancing, no gore and no real cruelty. It is for musical lovers, camp-cinema fans and anyone who wants a gleefully strange, unembarrassed spectacle.
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