Uglies Parent Guide

In the future, after humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels nearly causes their extinction, civilization is rebuilt - but with a twist. Now upon turning sixteen, everyone undergoes surgery to make them as beautiful as possible, eliminating prejudice against people’s appearances and creating harmony. Tally (Joey King), is only months away from her surgery when her best friend, Peris (Chase Stokes) is sent for his surgery, becomes a Pretty, and gets to move into the city.

Missing her friend, Tally bonds with Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about The Smoke, a place outside of the city where people live off the land and refuse the surgery. As Tally gets drawn deeper into Shay’s world, the choice to get the surgery becomes more complicated, and she begins to question everything she’s been taught.

I read the Uglies series when I was a teenager and enjoyed it. I don’t remember much of the plot all these years later, but I do remember that the books had deep themes and complicated moral questions. Unfortunately, this adaptation seems to have shed all of that clearly unwanted baggage. The Uglies movie feels like a production made a decade too late - but with the same quality as a 2013 made-for-TV YA adaptation written by someone who only read the SparkNote summary of the first book.

No one can convince me that this production was filmed in the 2020s. Everything about it screams 2010s, aside from the ages of the actors (though Joey King would have been far more age-appropriate casting in that decade than this one). Just look at the poster and you’ll see what I mean. Swap the word Uglies for Divergent and no one would notice a difference. Even the CGI appears to be from that era, which adds to the overall cheap-looking production design.

I can forgive cheap special effects if the script is well written, but that’s not the case here. Every scene feels stilted and unnatural, with weird transitions and awkward exposition dumps. The deep moral themes of the books are abandoned for a watered-down, sanitized message that’s as shallow as the Pretties. The entire production feels like it was fed through an AI that was asked to make the most bland, generic, and inoffensive YA film of all time.

I have a hunch that the movie rights were bought by a studio back when the books were popular, but the YA bubble burst before they could make it. I’m guessing that they held onto the property and just cobbled something together quickly and cheaply before the rights expired. This film feels like a copyright obligation rather than something anyone wanted to make.

Personally, I think Uglies barely qualifies as PG-13. With only some mild violence and a tiny bit of swearing, this production is appropriate for the teen audiences for whom it was made. Whether they’ll want to watch it is a whole other question, as the people who were teens when the books were popular are all in their 30s now and I have no idea if the series has been discovered by Gen Z. In any case, there are definitely worse things teens could be watching, but I have a feeling they’re too smart to fall for this obvious corporate ploy.