Cats: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

Towards the end of Jurassic Park (1993), Dr Malcolm muses on the decision to stock an island theme park full of dinosaur clones. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should,” he says. And so we turn our minds to a different (and equally calamitous) genetic experiment, Cats (2019).

It is rare for a film to be so unanimously and joyfully panned. It has been called “a monstrosity”, “an all-time disaster”, “a half-digested hairball of a movie.” “Cats is what you’d see if your third eye suddenly opened,” one commentator remarked. The Telegraph awarded it zero stars. It was reviewed so negatively that the verdicts – taken together – read like an obituary to cinema itself.

But why the furore? Cats – directed by Tom Hooper – is a reimagination of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic 1981 musical, which itself is an adaptation of TS Eliot’s Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). It’s the fourth longest-running Broadway musical of all time. Hooper directed the triumphant Les Misérables (2012), and the highly acclaimed 2010 film The King’s Speech. Lloyd Webber is a West End legend. Featuring an absurdly distinguished cast, Cats had all the ingredients to be fine – possibly even good.

But something went very wrong. The critics have laid much of the blame at the feet (paws?) of the cats themselves. TS Eliot’s notebooks, the cats are anthropomorphised creatures of poetic fancy; on the Broadway stage, they are recognisably athletic actors draped in fur and wearing makeup. We understand these things.

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Human-feline hybrids

Not so this time around – instead, the cats are human-feline hybrids, both person and cat and somehow neither at the same time. They have human faces, but cat ears and tails. The film – possibly a first in cinematic history – confronted the question of what a cat would look like with fingers and opposable thumbs.

And this crime – befitting of Frankenstein – was not committed on some anonymous actors fresh out of drama school, but on some of the world’s most beloved stars. Judi Dench and Ian McKellan strut about the screen draped in furs. Taylor Swift crops up for a bit as a cat with human breasts. Jennifer Hudson and Idris Elba are there too.

But Jason Derulo, who stars in the film, has defended it “as an incredible piece of art” against the chorus of damning reviews. It is exactly what you would say if you too were an ageing R ’n’ B artist who thought starring in an ill-conceived CGI’d adaptation of Cats would be the best way to claw back your legacy.

But perhaps Derulo is right. Maybe Cats will stand the test of time, and maybe we are just blind to its brilliance now. Doubt it, though – Cats is in fact a prize specimen of a much wider affliction for the film industry.

As the technology required to create films such as Cats advances, it paves an irresistible way for filmmakers. Forgo all the traditional tenets of good storytelling, and instead keep the audience entertained with whatever the latest glitzy development in technology might be.

Live-action remakes

The result of this is an explosion of unremarkable ‘live-action’ remakes – with the occasional horror show (Cats) thrown in to teach us a lesson. The Jungle Book was remade ‘live-action’ in 2016, Beauty and the Beast in 2017. The Lion King suffered the same fate this year. Studios have swapped the charming cartoons of old for hyper-realistic computer-generated bears, lions and talking teacups. And along the way, they have innovated all the joy out of the stories.

The charming ingenuity of the 1994 Lion King animation was traded for the brute realism of an entirely CGI-rendered world in the 2019 version. As a near shot-by-shot remake, its only selling point was its technological grandeur. But it doesn’t work – in a cartoon world, it makes sense for meerkats and warthogs and lions all to be friends – look how Simba smiles at Pumba as he sings. In full photorealism, Simba just looks hungry.

The problem with Cats and The Lion King alike – though these films didn’t work for a litany of reasons – is that they are not films that needed to be made. Filmmakers seem to spend far too long wondering how to get their hands on the technology to realise their cinematic vision, without actually interrogating whether their vision has any value in the first place.

This innovation has got everyone dreadfully overexcited – ready to test out the newest thing in the latest poorly written but fantastically cast half-baked remake of a classic. And we the audience are left leaving wanting to rip our hair out and scream that just because you can make something it doesn’t mean you have to.