Screen: Cats

So far, almost everyone has an opinion on Tom Hooper’s Cats, and so far, none of them are good. What, you find cat bodies fused with human faces to be jarring and unpleasant? You think the scale of the cats’ world is inconsistent and distracting? Oh, you can’t figure out if there’s a plot? Who cares!

Has anyone considered that Cats might actually be good? Sure, maybe not in the traditional sense, where narrative follows a logical course and the aesthetics point to a unified theme—if you’ve ever seen the live musical, you know that’s not true. But Cats does have the potential to give us a historical cinematic moment, similar to when audiences actually fainted during screenings of The Exorcist.

Cats is an enigma that provides very few answers. Why is Taylor Swift holding a bejeweled can of catnip? Why do only some cats have clothes? We won’t know until we see it, and we probably still won’t know after we see it. But that’s fine. Don’t fight it. Just take a deep breath, dive into the uncanny valley and let the Jellicle cats do their little Jellicle dances. Cats opens in theaters Dec. 20.