Uglies puts the “why?” back into “YA”

Less than a week before Uglies premiered on Netflix, former President Trump repeated a fear-mongering hoax that children are being forced to undergo gender-affirming surgery at their schools. While easily dismissed as the hateful ravings of a dangerous madman, this narrative does add perhaps the sole point of interest to the latest uninspired adaptation of YA inanity.

In its particular dystopia, based on Scott Westerfeld’s novel, Uglies is separated into two classes: the surgically perfected, and those who haven’t yet hit the age threshold to go under the knife. In this futuristic world, for reasons that are hard to understand despite plenty of dithering voiceover, when you turn 16 you are yassified by government mandate. It’s a premise aimed at the puberty-afflicted crowd, poking and prodding at their faces in the bathroom mirror (or in the front-facing camera reflection). The Pretties run the show and the Uglies yearn to get out of the awkward phase keeping them from their cool, sexy, grown-up lives. Simple enough, until some rebellious Uglies start pushing back.

Though the book came out before your Divergents and your Hunger Games and your Maze Runners, Uglies’ adaptation suffers from being nearly two decades too late. It would be like taking your mining equipment to California now, promising your concerned loved ones that there’s still gold in them thar hills. Even if Uglies was watchable, its tropes have been worn down to nubs and its themes wrung dry. Now—adapted by three hired-gun writers and overseen by Netflix captive McG (who’s spent the last decade cranking out instantly-forgotten streaming filler)—all the movie can truly call its own is a brutal CG sheen and some truly nonsensical ideas.

Joey King, as close to a mascot as Netflix has outside of the Stranger Things kids, stars as Tally. She and a cast of skinny, perfectly symmetrical movie stars in their twenties and thirties half-heartedly pretend to be ugly 15-year-olds. Their small city is split in two. On one side, the under-16s are kept in a drab Brazil-lite school-jail; on the other, the over-16s are thriving in what looks like the kind of bacchanal that takes place during Brazil’s Carnival. In this fantasy of urban adulthood, it’s all masquerades and fireworks and fakey VFX lights, bodies constantly gyrating in slow motion to a down-tempo cover of “Such Great Heights.” The two sides are kept separated (again, for reasons beyond comprehension) by a sci-fi surveillance state, ships and drones from Star Wars patrolling at the behest of top scientist Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox, never hammy enough).

A sidebar: Casting a trans woman as an antagonist literally forcing surgeries onto children is about as tone-deaf a move as you could make, even if casting occurred longer ago than you might expect (Netflix has been sitting on this bomb for a few years).

But this poorly-aged decision is just one of many, jockeying for position over the course of the generic plot. After her hunky pal Peris (Chase Stokes) leaves to become even hunkier, Tally is wooed to the forbidden runaway town of The Smoke (an admittedly great name for a forbidden runaway town) by rabblerouser Shay (Brianne Tju), who would rather ride her hoverboard than follow the rules, man. Shay takes off and Tally gets bullied into finding, then outing The Smoke by Cable, who threatens to withhold Prettiness if Tally doesn’t cooperate.

When she finally arrives at The Smoke, Tally finds a utopian farming collective of free thinkers, one that isn’t interested in conforming to a society based on beauty. You can tell this because its residents all look like Patagonia models rather than Gucci models. These models are led by David (Keith Powers), who would rival Peris in a hunk-off and who instantly falls for Tally’s lack of personality. Will Tally betray these fine upstanding Uglies-By-Choice? Is there a secret dark side to the bimbofication surgery that makes you blonder, smoother, and immediately more dumb? Though the answers are dull, the questions are so confused and silly that it’s hard not to laugh.

And, despite there being a decent amount of story to chuckle through, Uglies’ 100-minute runtime (at least 10 minutes of which are credits) is padded out by montage after montage. Janky hoverboarding makes up much of this, its actors turning into low-res Silver Surfers (circa 2007, which would at least have been a sensible time for this movie to come out) as they traverse routes straight out of SSX Shitty. That means there’s almost no time for characterization or emotional ramp-ups; every conversation is a tearful goodbye, a desperate confession, a furious accusation. There’s also no time for a plot to naturally develop. Before you know it, Tally is jumping out of a helicopter into a burning field of super-flowers, which are apparently draining the world of nutrients, and chased by Mega-Pretties sprinting around in X-Men Halloween costumes.

All of Uglies feels like a rush job where its creators had the instruction manual but lost the proper parts. In their place are whatever was cheapest, from the sound design (everything zooms and whirs and buzzes even though it’s mostly a movie about 15-year-olds walking around in hallways and the woods) to the half-animated opening exposition. I’m convinced this latter sequence was generated by AI, aesthetically inseparable from that immobile style of “filmmaking” where it’s just one soft, rubber-edged, almost-stock image fading into another. And it doesn’t even look that different from McG’s footage. Uglies is a film shot through an Instagram filter—not just its airbrushed Pretties, purposely off-putting in their color contacts, but its entire Dollar Store Luc Besson aesthetic. The only exceptional or memorable part of Uglies is its perfectly terrible timing, and even that, by virtue of its quality, may not even have an impact. Any worry that Donald Trump may mistake it for a documentary is assuaged by this movie’s instant exile into streaming no man’s land.

Director: McG
Writer: Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, Whit Anderson
Starring: Joey King, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes, Brianne Tju, Jan Luis Castellanos, Charmin Lee, Laverne Cox
Release Date: September 13, 2024 (Netflix)