They say comparison is the thief of joy. So, what if everyone was made equally beautiful and perfect? That should, in theory, eliminate unhappiness and unfulfilled longing. In Uglies, Tally Youngblood can’t wait for her sixteenth birthday when she will become beautiful. In Tally’s world, sweet sixteen is a rite of passage where teenagers undergo extreme, state-sponsored cosmetic surgery to become Pretty.
Many people don’t really like their appearances and bodies when they’re growing up. Being a teenager is hard enough, but for Tally, fitting in and being accepted feels like life or death. Like everyone in her generation, Tally has been body shamed from birth by society to believe that normal people, called Uglies, are inferior to the Pretties. The surgery is their golden ticket to adulthood, where Pretties party forever.
Which is why Tally struggles to understand why her friend Shay rejects the surgery and wants to run away into the wilderness to join a community of non-conformists called the Smoke. Shay tries to convince Tally that everyone is beautiful just the way they are and that their imperfections are what make them special. Before leaving, Shay gives Tally cryptic directions to find the Smoke if she decides to join them.
On her sixteenth birthday, Tally is devastated when her surgery is cancelled, and she’s taken into custody. There, she meets Dr. Cable, who tells her that Shay’s in danger. Dr Cable claims the Smoke are terrorists planning to bomb their city, and it’s Tally’s duty to help the authorities find the Smoke and bring Shay home. If she doesn’t comply, Dr Cable promises that Tally will be Ugly forever.
Tally then leaves the familiar, goes on an epic journey, and discovers the “ugly” truth about her world from the Smoke. When Tally learns the Pretty surgery deliberately renders free thought impossible, she experiences a painful crisis and must choose where her loyalties lie. Ultimately, like any YA story, Tally must heed the call to rise and resist. In between all that, however, she does find the time to fall in love with the Smoke’s leader, David.
The 2024 movie is based on the book Uglies, the first of Scott Westerfeld’s popular YA trilogy. The book has enough depth that it’s sometimes on the reading list at universities. That’s how I came to know of Uglies, as part of a course on Young Adult fiction. Westerfeld’s book raises plenty of emotionally charged critiques on body image, self-acceptance, and societal pressures towards impossible beauty standards.
The movie adaptation gives Westerfeld’s story the full Pretty treatment: it takes away all depth and substance and replaces it with a skin-deep storyline and superficial characters. I knew it was all going downhill within the opening seconds when Tally does a voiceover exposition dump. It was like being force-fed a sermon on how greed and war made the world so ugly that people decided plastic surgery was the answer to improve human nature.
The worldbuilding that Westerfeld crafted in his novel feels surgically removed. What we’re left with instead is atrocious CGI and visuals that are so artificial and amateur-looking that they assault the eye in every scene. The unique slang and teen talk of the book are also gone, replaced by a gratingly faux-West-Coast-Valley-Girl whine that would make even the Kardashians cringe.
I’m just grateful the movie did not completely turn the Smoke into a Soviet-style commune of hippies. They retained some semblance of their book counterparts, although the movie version of David is no rebel leader or boy revolutionary in the making. Other characters aren’t so lucky, least of all Tally. To call Tally two-dimensional would be to give her more depth than she has.
Joey King tries her best to deliver, but the script is so shallow that her version of Tally Youngblood is certainly no Katniss Everdeen. She’s not even Tris Prior. Heck, Bella Swan had more substance. Tally won’t be invited to sit at the popular table with her far more famous YA book-to-movie sisters. Also, who would seriously believe that anyone that looks like Joey King can be called Ugly?
Netflix’s adaptation of Uglies has inflicted upon the novel what Dr. Cable’s cosmetic surgery does to people: they lobotomized it. There is nothing redeemable, let alone salvageable, about the movie, which feels both insipid and joyless. Not every bestselling book needs to be adapted for the screen. Just like Tally learns, most things are good enough just the way they are.
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