On December 20th, 2019, the movie “Cats” came out, and so far it has been a total bust. Starring Francesca Hayward, Taylor Swift, James Cordon, and Rebel Wilson, Cats has gotten an average of about one out of five stars. The movie is overflowing with questionable songs, with no visible relation to a plot of any kind. I do not recommend this movie and here is why.

The Cats movie is supposed to be about the Jellicle cats picking one of their own kind to be sent off to the Heaviside Layer, in hopes of them being “reborn” into a newer, better life. However, the story is not clearly represented and is very confusing to watch. The movie started with a cat being thrown out by its owner. The screen then jumps to a song about the Jellicle cats as individuals and as a group. I understand this is supposed to be a musical. However, the ratio between the amount of songs vs dialogue was unequal. They took up the whole movie without explaining what was going on. All I could get out of the story was that the cats have different names unique to them, cats aren’t dogs, and a cat flew away in a hot air balloon. I was left with many questions like, where is that cat going? What happens to the other cats? Did the conflict get resolved for good? And many more questions about critical information that wasn’t explained through the entirety of the film. 

My biggest problem with the plot was the conflict. After watching the movie, I still have no idea what the actual problem was and how it was resolved. Towards the beginning of the movie Macavity, the mysterious cat, was introduced. There was no background information on who he really was. There was a wanted poster of him up on a lamp post with no explanation of why he was wanted or why he was feared. It would have really added to the movie if they went more in depth with his past. The plot has a lot of holes where the conflict should have been, and I think it would have been a better movie if the conflict was better represented.

In the movie the songs overrode the dialogue. They were nothing more than a distraction from the real plot. With little introduction to the setting, characters, and confluctions, the songs seemed random and unrelated to the progression of the story. Right away at the beginning of the movie, a song. Every time a new cat shows up, a song. Every time someone breathed, a song. The beginning of a movie is a good time to intrigue the person watching and make them want to know more. Neither of those things happened to me with the song that was presented, and if anything it just confused me. I didn’t realize, until Victoria, the main cat of the movie, said herself, that she had been abandoned. In another part of the movie, a song was sung, all the cats ran away, and Victoria ended up in a house with cats and jewelry. All of these scenes seemed as if they were randomly put together and labeled with the title of a movie.

The Cats movie had the perfect cast to be a great success. However, the budget was 95 million US dollars. Compared to Frozen II’s budget of 150 million, Cats has a sad excuse of a movie budget. If they had put more money into this movie, it may have been more than mediocre. Even so, Cats should have stayed a play. The backgrounds looked unrealistic to my eyes, in the way that it was not proportionate with the cats’ size. Some of the smaller animals, for instance, the mice, were visibly edited in. The characters could have been more cleanly added into the movie had more time, and money, been invested into it. 

The average rating is around 2.5 stars out of ten. My rating is going to have to be a 2 out of ten. They had amazing people in this movie and it could’ve been a great movie. Instead they put in mediocre songs, and a confusing, and debatably nonexistent plot. I would not recommend anyone to watch this movie. Overall it made me disappointed and question how the producers of the movie thought the viewers would react. Did they expect the movie to be successful? If so maybe they should have raised the budget. I wonder what made them believe that we would like to see this train-wreck of a movie. They completely defaced an old authentic play. It makes me wonder why they made it into a movie in the first place.