"Now and forever," boasted the tagline of the Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's mega musical Cats, which opened in 1982 and ran for a record-breaking 18 years. (Not quite forever, but not bad.)

In the wake of the first trailer for Tom Hooper's all-star, $US95-million adaptation, back in July, I found myself repeatedly accosted by screenshots of the titular felines, who had been chillingly rendered as pointy-eared uncanny-valley escapees, as I went about my business online — and those three words reverberated in my mind, suddenly seeming more like a threat than a promise: "Now and forever."

"Is Cats the creepiest film of the year?" crowed The Guardian after the trailer dropped.

It happened to come hot on the paws of the much-hyped 'live-action' remake of The Lion King — a bizarro episode of Planet Earth that saw the African savannah's inhabitants forfeit most of their expressive capacities in service of (admittedly stunning) photorealism.

Francesca Hayward and Robbie Fairchild are former principal dancers of the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet, respectively. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures )

The trailer for Cats, itself a nostalgia-fuelled exercise in family-friendly, technologically-dazzling spectacle, presented the opposite issue: despite liberal use of some dark magic called "digital fur technology", Hooper's felines remained uncomfortably humanoid in appearance. They had hands! They had feet! They had boobs?

And, they had the faces of Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, Idris Elba and Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo and Jennifer Hudson, James Corden and Rebel Wilson … a veritable litter of stars, as motley as the Jellicle cat collective they were contracted to depict, for undoubtedly very handsome sums.

Singer and dancer Jason Derulo was excited to revisit his ballet, jazz and tap training as the charismatic Rum Tum Tugger. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures )

I'm guessing costume designer Paco Delgado didn't want to risk obscuring all these Very Expensive faces under heavy make-up or CGI wizardry.

The internet was understandably agog at the sight of these mutant creatures prancing, preening, and flipping across digitally-rendered countertops and stairwells. At times they appeared to be the size of actual cats, but at others more like rats — the scaling just as strange as anything I've described so far.

The two-minute trailer played like some sort of deepfake experiment gone horribly and/or hilariously wrong.

Naturally, it was as catnip to the brave, the perversely curious, and the foolhardy among us.

All 110 minutes of Cats have at last been unleashed, the sum total being a frenzied and phantasmagorical furry convention that's likely to rile old school fans of the stage show and thoroughly baffle or bore just about everyone else.

If I should stoop to suggesting that the film is indeed a cat-astrophe, you can be assured that that's a better cat pun than any of those actually in the darn thing (and there are a bunch).

For those unfamiliar with the premise, I'll offer some words sung by Munkustrap, a helpful cat prone to explaining what the hell is going on at any given moment (played in the film by Robbie Fairchild): "Jellicle cats meet once a year / At the Jellicle Ball where we all rejoice / And the Jellicle leader will soon appear / And make what is known as the Jellicle Choice."

That's it. That's the plot.

Judi Dench was originally cast in the 1981 London stage production of Cats but was forced to pull out after injuring her Achilles during rehearsals. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures )

It is Dench who dons the heavy fur coat (yes, you read that right) of Old Deuteronomy here — the elderly and beloved head Jellicle, traditionally played by a man, whose job it is to determine which of them will ascend to the Heaviside Layer (an ill-defined kitty paradise of sorts) where they will be reborn.

Until it's time for this proclamation, however, the cats pretty much just dance and sing, introducing themselves one by one through the medium of elaborate musical numbers.

Got it?

Production designer Eve Stewart drew inspiration from photographs of run-down music halls in Soho and the West End in the 1930s. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures )

In much the same way that dreams make total sense while you're dreaming but typically devolve into nonsense in the attempt to explain them after the fact, there's an internal logic to Cats that is perfectly comprehensible to me as someone whose toddlerhood involved many hours spent dancing around the living room to the soundtrack, crowned by the elasticated cat ear headband that my mother had made for me.

If that's not an experience that you can identify with, then I'd wager that Cats, with its doggedly simple but nonsensical mythology, is going to get your tongue.

Its famously thin plot was cobbled together from the poems that make up TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (undoubtedly the illustrious author's most light-hearted collection).

In a foolish attempt to raise the stakes of Lloyd Webber's largely episodic rhyming reverie, Hooper – who first brought Broadway to the big screen back in 2012 with the showily dreary, story-heavy epic Les Miserables – has chosen to shoehorn tidbits of plot (and awkward, would-be witty dialogue) into Cats.

The Jellicle Ball has thus become a kind of American Idol style competition, in which the cat with the best song wins the right to move on to their next life, and the role of the villainous Macavity (Elba in lime-green contacts, doing his best evil laugh) beefed up — he's now hell-bent on taking out the top prize, with the assistance of sex kitten Bombalurina (Swift).

Idris Elba says director Tom Hooper approached him for the role of trickster and outlaw Macavity because it would be out of his comfort zone. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures )

Plus, a lithe young lady cat named Victoria (ballerina Francesca Hayward) gets foregrounded as a point of identification for viewers, her sudden arrival on the Jellicle scene the pretence for the early introductory numbers.

Do these tweaks make the narrative easier to follow? I guess.

But do they make it any better, or more logical? Absolutely not.

The film's dance styles and sequences were choreographed by three-time Tony award-winner Andy Blankenbuehler (In the Heights, Hamilton). ( Supplied: Universal Pictures )

These are still loquacious tap-dancing cats who claim to run British railway stations and rob homes. The inherent silliness of the whole enterprise only gets accentuated in bestowing conventional motives to these characters. Just let them dance! That's what we came for!

And, wouldn't you know it, they've made a cat's breakfast of that too. It's dizzying enough to watch the entire cast whirly-dervishing around, disconcertingly weightless thanks to the gravity-defying properties of CGI — but does the camera have to join in? So many of the dance sequences are cut like an action movie, actively obscuring Andy Blankenbuehler's choreography.

While some semblance of gravitas is preserved for the film's emotional fulcrum — when Jennifer Hudson delivers her tearful, snot-nosed rendition of show-stopper Memory as the outcast ex-glamour cat Grizabella (and finally bags herself that Idol top prize) — this scene is quickly swallowed up in the bombastically hyperreal mélange that is Tom Hooper's Jellicle Ball.

In the end, however, I must leave it entirely up to you, dear reader, to determine whether you'll be better off with or without seeing, for example, the inherently smug James Corden lasciviously waggling his tongue as a giant bottle of champagne gushes and bubbles onto his lightly-furred face, amongst the film's many other surreally grotesque tableaux imprinted upon my consciousness — now, and forever.

Cats is in cinemas from December 26.

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