Posted by on December 21, 2019 4:58 am
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Categories: µ Newsjones

Photo Illustration by Kristen Hazzard/The Daily Beast/Universal Pictures & Alamy

Nothing can prepare you for the faces. You can read a hundred pieces about Cats, director Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beloved-ish musical about cats having a singing competition, and nothing, nothing you read about it could prepare you for the pure, unnerving spectacle of seeing a computer trying to affix human faces to a fucked up, motion-capture cat with human body parts, a tail, and a big human nose, sitting right there in the middle of a cat’s head, sitting on human shoulders, doing dancing routines in a world scaled to cat size.

Sometimes, the faces look… fine? Functional? You’ll see Dame Judi Dench in a close-up, and it’s makeup, like a Star Trek alien, except she’s singing about being a cat instead of engaging in high-level diplomacy with Jean-Luc Picard. But the second anyone starts moving their body, the effect goes haywire. The face always seems a step or two behind the moving body—a human visage temporarily displaced from the twisted cat demon. Especially in a movie theater, watching on a high-definition projector, your attention affixed to the horror show going on in front of you, you can’t help but notice. This movie would work better if, instead of being a 2.35:1 monstrosity getting pumped into your face, it was pan-and-scanned to 4:3, and played on a worn-out tube TV with a reddish tint. The lost detail would subject you to less of these uncanny eyesores that are trying to pass for, um, sexualized cat people.

It’s honestly a miracle a movie this twisted got made, in a world where every movie that costs more than $50 million is engineered for maximum inoffensiveness. It’s such a horrible idea, stem to stern, made even more baffling by the number of times they must have looked over the technology tests and assumed it was going to look better than that, sooner or later.

Read more at The Daily Beast.