Cats (Dir Tom Hooper, 1h 50m)

In 1939, with the bulk of his most famous work, including The Wasteland, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday behind him, TS Eliot began to write poetry of a very different form to his dense, heavily allusionary work-taking the initial form of poems in letters to his god-children, they were eventually collected, as Old Posum's Book of Practical Cats, by Faber and Faber in the autumn of 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II. In essence, the work is a series of character portraits, of various cats, from the criminal McCavity, to the station cat, Skimbleshanks, without plot, much of a concept, or indeed any further purpose.

And then Andrew Lloyd Webber made a musical of it. Cats, first premiering in 1982, tells the story of the Jellicles, a tribe of cats who meet annually so that the most deserving of their number can ascend to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn, smartly connects the vignettes about each cat to a plot that serves them well. It is also 1980s musical theatre at its most spectacularly 1980s, with the original costumes matching 1980s New Romantics aesthetics, and the androgyny and sensuality of this period, not to mention a heavily synth and guitar-led soundtrack, and a self-assured, if impressively overblown sense to itself.

Cue Tom Hooper. Hooper, to be fair, must have seemed on paper like a perfectly suitable choice-having already lucratively adapted Les Miserables (2012) , the equally 1980s, equally overblown and equally long-running adaption of the Victor Hugo novel; it, after all, pulled in nearly half a billion dollars, won a heap of gongs, and, even if Russell Crowe foghorned his way through his supporting role as Jean Valjean's nemesis, Inspector Javert, and overly showy camerawork, it can be regarded as a solid, faithful adaption. Which is more, sadly, that can be said for Cats.

For Cats despite everything, despite excellent choreography, despite lavish sets, despite a strong, perfectly cast set of actors, a fever-dream in cinematic form, the most surreal, visually confusing, and disturbing film released by a major studio in this century, if not the entire history of cinema, a series of bizarre, fear-inducing and unusual decisions made in the name of bringing this beloved film to life. And at the centre of the horror, like the cinematic equivilent of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, thumping out a veritable Bonham drum solo as it thwacks between board and brick, are the cats themselves.

Where does one start with the cats of Cats? Strangely, one can somewhat understand the choice, a quite literal translation of the leotards and paint and hairpieces into the photorealism of a furred and humanoid and diminutive race of catlike creatures that scamper throughout the performance. But it's terrifying, and what makes it terrifying is the pure, fear-inducing, ungainliness of it all. This is apparent from the beginning, as, when Victoria, essentially our protagonist throughout the film,(ballerina Francesca Hayward) is dumped by her owners in the middle of Jellicle territory, we get what I can only describe as "pure horror movie visuals" from the very beginning, of shadowy, tiny, and, basically, disturbingly uncanny creatures appear.

They are horrifying, a mixture of Mars Needs Moms-level motion capture, closeups where characters faces have not been composited properly, scenes where digital effects work remains barebones or incomplete, with Hooper admitting that VFX work ended on the film barely two days before premier, and in a jawdroppingly strange turn of events is basically getting a cinematic equivilent of a videogame patch whilst still in cinemas. It seems almost a slap in the face, a brutal, almost mocking betrayal of Cats' iconic designs adored by countless fans and cosplayers around the world, to replace them with what looks like the feline equivalent of the terribly CGI'd monkeys from Basement Jaxx's 2001 music video, "Where's Your Head At?"

We get nearly two hours of these things, these Jellicles, these homunculus-esque bald creatures. Out of their bald, furred, and...strangely burlesque appearances poke the faces of our cast. It's...honestly quite difficult to describe these things, to describe exactly why they do not work, at least as a visual effect. They do not work. They are some horrifying half-way house between humans dressed as cats and humanoid cats. For a start, one honestly wonders why the film could not have simply built on the stage versions of each characters' appearance, and simply CGI'd in fur where necessary, or kept the striking and stylish appearance of each character-such that each is visually unique from metres, if not further away. It's a brilliant bit of character design and costuming that's only built the legacy of the show. Furthermore, in the case of both Jason DeRulo and Idris Elba, who get the shortest, and definitely the worst, stick in terms of how they incorporate their facial acting into the CGI work, in a strange, and actually more unsettling way, that begs the question if BAME actors and actresses were taken into account

Had this film gone the whole hog, and used motion capture as the workmanlike but technically stunning Lion King, where the motion-capture was used to bring life to digital puppets, or, to to be blunt, if the film had done more than the cinematic equivalent of one of those seaside put your face in the hole" or instagram filter, it would have been much more technically impressive, less fear-inducing, and I would not have enjoyed it as much. For, despite everything about its protagonists, beneath the uncanny digital skin, despite the fact that this is one of the visually strangest, most needlessly complex things I have ever seen, despite the fact that I've never seen the original stage musical...

Despite everything I think I love this film, at least a little, despite its numerous flaws, not in the self-detatched, ironic, post-cultural way, but in embracing that it is first and foremost, a musical. Musicals are not governed by the rules of Normal Cinema. Never have been, never will be. They are not only escapism from the concepts of normality on stage. but indeed from the normal conventions of story-telling-one only has to look just at Lloyd-Webber's own work (from Evita, which has Che Guevera singing, to Starlight Express, in which rollerskating trains race each other for the hand of another train. Ahem), to see how strange they can get.

The same can, in general, be said of the musical as film, and Cats encapsulates this perfectly, and, unlike some, actually gives a reason for having dialogue sung, rather than spoken, throughout. Are the character designs strange, occasionally pulling one out of the action, and occasionally poorly rendered? Yes, absolutely, but after a while, your mind, despite itself, shrugs, and takes it reasonably well, all things considered. After a while, the character's appearance and the performance becomes one-and where the film certainly, and undoubtedly triumphs is in the physical performance.

Here, Hooper actually seems to have learnt something from the badly shot Les Miserables, letting performances visually breathe, rather than shoving a camera in his actor's face-the dance choreography is superb, with  Skimbleshanks' section in particular, dominated by tap-dancing that slowly becomes an imitation of a train before sweeping out across London, and the finale, in Trafalgar Square, particularly noteworthy for their impressive scale. The flip-side of this is that, when the camera does need to hold on a character's face-and it's definitely here, rather than in full-body shots that the cat-ening of each actor is strongest, even in the case of DeRulo and Elba, with the CGI at its best-strangest of all, it is Taylor Swift, who utterly steals her scenes as Bombalurina who actually comes off best overall, a nigh-perfect mix of performance, effects and presence-whether she leans best into the pure campy ridiculousness of it, or whether Swift's agent simply made sure that her performance was the best rendered.

 Nowhere does this marriage of effects, performance and choreography work better than Angelica Huston's Grizabella and her showstopping performance of Memory, which, in all honesty, makes up for what comes before it, in spades. Is Cats a perfect film? No. It's a visual carcrash, lorded over with visual effects that only hit the mark half the time, and freak you out the other, bewildering visual choices, and almost, at points, loses itself completely to this lapse in judgement. But despite this, despite the slight to the original stageplay, where Cats is strongest is in its performances, when technology doesn't hold them back. For better or ill, there is something utterly unforgettable about Cats; whether you see it as visual nightmare, or practical recreation of beloved musical, Cats is a universal experience, all-encompassing, life-changing-whether it is the film of your dreams or your nightmares, is up to you.

Rating: Avoid (Unless you like Cats)