Sometime around November my sister and I went to go watch a movie in the cinema and during one of those trailer previews (everyone loves sitting through) the trailer for “Cats: The Musical” played. Upon watching it, my sister and I were ecstatic and knew instantly that we wanted to watch it as soon as it came out. I mean how could we not? The killer all-star cast, the impressive-looking CGI, the unknown narrative; it looked amazing. Our anticipation of the movie was only magnified when we would often get a clip or tease of the movie whilst scrolling through social media; if that taught me anything it was that the marketing of a movie can persuade people to watch anything
About a month later the movie was finally out. We headed to the cinema and were ready to have the movie experience of our lives… or so we thought.
As the movie began I sat there in confusion, yet I told myself as the narrative developed I’d understand the movie.
Ten minutes in and I sat, still in confusion.
An hour in and I was wondering when it would begin to make sense.
The credits rolled and I questioned what I’d just spent the last two hours of my life and paid my own actual money to endure.
I stayed in my confusion till I got home later that night and did a little research on the movie.
You might ask yourself: “How confusing can the movie actually be? You were probably just not paying enough attention”. And I’d love to believe that was the case but in reality… it was just a bad story.
The first ten minutes of the movie was a song about being a “Jellicle cat”. Though the production and quality of the song was phenomenal, by the end of the long-winded musical number I was still unclear as to what a “Jellicle cat” was; actually I left the cinema unclear as to what “Jellicle” even meant
One hour- and what felt like 25 musical numbers- later I was sat in my seat wondering how I got there. To say the movie is bizarre would be an understatement. I did, however, watch the movie till the end. Although I thoroughly enjoyed every single magnificent musical number of that movie, I felt as though the movie was missing something… subtitles! I couldn’t understand a word they were singing for the majority of the movie. In most other movies that wouldn’t be too much of a problem as the plot of the movie could be understood without the songs. But not in Cats! The narrative of the movie is completely driven by the songs. If you don’t understand the songs, you don’t understand the movie. To make matters worse the songs in the movie were all based on poetry. Trying to understand it took me bad to my English literature GCSE exam and I- like many others- don’t go to the cinema to reminisce on my past exams.
The ending of Cats crowned my confusion in a perfectly perplexing way; so much so that I felt compelled to make the explanation for the ending of the movie my first google search upon my quest to understand the movie. To this day, I still don’t completely understand the movie. Nevertheless, I really did genuinely enjoy the movie- despite the tone of this article. Though it was confusing it managed to transport me to a land where Jason Durelo was a cat singing hip-hop ( if you told my 13-year-old self that I’d witness such a thing there’s no way I’d believe you). The singing throughout the movie was utterly breathtaking and the last musical number left me in goosebumps. The narrative was definitely obscure but the movie as a whole was actually good. Did I expect better upon seeing the cast list? Yes. But I still don’t regret watching the movie. In fact, I recommend anyone reading this to watch it if you haven’t already.
By: Naomi Eboreime
