USA, — In Netflix’s bar-lowering YA fantasy–drama “Uglies,” childhoods are spent in a boarding school-type facility that looks suspiciously like a prison, though the kids inside don’t know any better. Instead they spend all their days preparing for the day they turn 16, at which point everyone in this dystopia gets an operation to turn from “uglies” into Snapchat-filtered, flawless-looking versions of themselves called “pretties.” This rite of passage also grants them literal passage to the city across the bay that looks as if it elected Jay Gatsby mayor; fireworks are constantly exploding, spotlights always swaying, music endlessly blaring over a metropolis drunk on CGI and good vibes.
The place looks and feels just as fake as its denizens, and we’re supposed to pretend it’s a major reveal later on when we find the surgery takes away more than just their looks. Granted, if director McG and his small platoon of writers gave due consideration to basic things like character, tone and story, we might have given “Uglies” some credit for reflecting this society’s phoniness through the plastic-y environments of its supposed utopia. Alas, when everything about “Uglies” seems phony, nothing really does for our hero Tally Youngblood (Joey King) to overcome—and this lifeless movie about a society brainwashed into lifelessness isn’t nearly entertaining enough to appreciate the irony.
The movie sees Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor and Whit Anderson adapting the 2005 Scott Westerfield book that kicked off a trilogy, and it’s been in some stage of development for the better part of the last two decades. That’s just about the most logical thing about “Uglies,” given how warmed-over the YA-ness of it all tastes. A prologue mentioning environmental collapse? Check. Antagonistic factions? Check. Fears of anonymous, world ending-weapons? Check. And yet the question of why no one appears to have even considered updating Westerfield’s material reverberates. The table-setting informs us of the world’s belief that “when everyone is perfect, conflict melts away"; about a dozen sociopolitical questions are sparked and ignored over the next 100 minutes. But the root issue for “Uglies” is that we’re unable to see the humanity in those who would so robotically surrender to that philosophy, or else notice whatever it is they might lose if they decide not to.
Take Tally, who reluctantly says bye to her best-friend-but-maybe-more when he turns 16 a few months before her, and whose heart we assume would shatter when he doesn’t return like he promised he would. Yet in a jiffy she moves on, sparking up a BFFship with a schoolmate who’s thinking about leaving to find a rebel prophet, rendering Tally as a character with only as much agency as the plot requires in any given scene. It’s startling and unconvincing. “Uglies” overwhelms itself with such dynamics where the movie appears embarrassed of its own storytelling, like it wants to reach the credits quickly but can’t find the most efficient way to get there. The first truly interesting detail – books, it appears, are outlawed in this world – comes 20 minutes in. But it’s only ever a detail, never becoming a texture to make the story or stakes of “Uglies” feel tangible. And in this movie where the most surprising thing is its gall to set up a sequel, if we can hardly believe its world, what chance is there we can believe in the eventual battle for its salvation, either?
Tally’s journey will, with little rhyme or reason, take her from being enlisted on a mission to making predictable discoveries about the hierarchy of things to the helm of a revolution that has all the tenor of a high school squabble. “Uglies” is a movie that occasionally forgets it’s a movie and stumbles into pop-soundtracked tech demo from circa 2002. Consequentially, there’s no sense of storytelling proximity; not between places, not between factions, not between characters’ understanding of history and that history itself, not between what is happening in a given moment and what it means for the bigger picture.
Beyond the outdated, banal simplicity of its messaging, I suppose an analogy for the dead-endedness of adulthood reveals itself when we see just what happens to “pretties” during their 16th-birthday operation. Or, if the movie were better constructed, for our willingness to so completely surrender our attention over to external forces that we lose our own humanity. In that regard, “Uglies” could be the very thing it wants to warn us against.
"Uglies" is now streaming on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for some violence and action, and brief strong language. Runtime: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
Starring Joey King, Brianne Tju, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes
Directed by McG; written by Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor and Whit Anderson
2024
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