A short 15 years ago, in a(n almost) post-Harry Potter world, it looked as if the young adult SFF wave was poised to be the surest movie star-making mill to arise in some time. This seemed, for a brief moment, particularly true for young actresses, with Kristen Stewart emerging the unlikeliest of franchise queens with the Twilight Saga, Jennifer Lawrence storming into the mainstream and A-list stardom with The Hunger Games quartet, and the mounting cultural hullabaloo surrounding such franchises reaching its apex with Shailine Woodley’s entrance into the Divergent-verse. Where Twilight capitalized on the Harry Potter craze, entering the broader public consciousness between the fifth and sixth wizarding world films, Divergent attempted a similar trick, with its first entry arriving seven months before the former’s third (in 2014). All of these post-Potter efforts employed similar tactics in pursuit of similar monolithic success: imparting instant stardom upon actresses heretofore known for grittier work; assembling ascendant supporting casts and sturdy, non-blockbuster-typical veterans; and employing directors of at least some critical intrigue.
But things were already beginning to yo-yo within the YA-SFF cottage industry by this point. Plenty of people won’t remember this, but notable flame-outs of zeitgeist projects had already begun to plague the calculus before Divergent even dropped, including Eragon (2006), The Lightning Thief (2010), I Am Number Four (2011), City of Bones (2013), and Beautiful Creatures (2013), and that’s before factoring in the failures of more canonically respectable adaptation material like Ender’s Game (2013) and The Giver (2014). And so, despite the relative quality and surprising financial success of The Maze Runner, the increasing proximity of failed efforts proved telling, and Divergent failed to even arrive at its final (although ill-advisedly addended) final entry (but it at least exceeded on a percentile basis the short-circuited run of The Chronicles of Narnia franchise). Given the concentrated deluge of these projects, what came in the wake of Divergent’s collapse (after 2016’s Allegiant) was an expected period of brief peace, followed by an even more expected period of attempted resurgence, with the uninspired visions of Mortal Engines, A Wrinkle in TIme, and The Darkest Minds all arriving in 2018 alone. Since then, the moviegoing landscape has remained less flooded with this particular brand of mindless pulp. Perhaps that is because the advent of streaming dominance has lessened public visibility of such projects; perhaps it’s because the MCU has since become the preferred artless, assembly-line opium of the masses.
Whatever the case, it’s tough to reckon with how bizarre the arrival of the latest YA dystopian adaptation, Uglies, is in our current cinematic climate. Stepping into the house that K-Stew and J-Law built comes Joey King, a full 10 years too late (according to a generous timeline), with the film tellingly arriving an additional nigh-three years after production wrapped. When considering why it took so long for this particular novel to secure film status — it was published earlier than every other novel referenced in this review outside of those written by Lois Lowry, Orson Scott Card, and She Who Must Not Be Named, at the very beginning of the YA craze that for years reconfigured chain bookstores nationwide — it’s hard not to point to its plot: in a future society, every citizen is gifted plastic surgery upon their 16th birthday so that they might at last be pretty, until one reluctantly revolutionary teen learns that it’s internal beauty that matters, all that glitters isn’t gold, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc., etc.
Tally Youngblood (King) is said reluctant revolutionary, obsessed with beauty standards but also possessing a penchant for rule-breaking. As the film opens, she and her best friend Peris (Chase Stokes), who is about to turn 16, are reaffirming their vow to remain BFFs, regardless of the fact that she will be ugly for a full three months longer than him. (Lesson one: if you want to respect the hamfisted messaging of the source material, don’t cast King and Stokes and then try to convince the audience they are hideous by announcing flaws that don’t exist, like a big nose and squinty eyes; viewers won’t thank you for the implied insult.) They agree on a time and location to meet after his surgery, but Peris of course is ghost, so Tally sneaks into a late-night soiree — which seems to be the only activity for pretties — in order to find her friend. After being discovered and fleeing — ugly people ruin parties, natch — Tally’s escape is aided by Shay (Brianne Tju), who rescues her via hoverboard (source material author Scott Westerfeld apparently couldn’t come up with a more imaginative name, but they are basically lifted straight out of Back to the Future and operate using magnetic levitation, which means lots of embarrassingly CGI’d shots of sick shredding along the city’s rail system). Shay and Tally quickly grow close, to the point that the former confides her plan to forgo surgery and instead head to “The Smoke,” a rumored location outside the city run by a mysterious leader named David (Keith Powers). Wanting to be pretty more than anything, Tally refuses, but as soon as her 16th birthday rolls around, she is denied surgery and coerced into turning spy for Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox, trying her best to serve vamp-camp), the end goal being the capture of David, who pretty society regards as a dangerous revolutionary.
Talk about time capsule cinema. The generic dystopian pulp that Uglies oozes feels distinctly aughts-era, even more so for the sledgehammer subtly of the material’s core metaphor. Sure, there’s the expected nefarious scientificism, the overtly defined social stratas, and the pastoral utopia that exists outside the reach of urban crawl that all other such projects boast — not to mention the whelm of skateboarder iconography here working overtime to recall a certain 2000s, anti-authority pop punk ethos — but everything about Uglies is so dumb and blunt as to make dumb and blunt franchises like Divergent seem positively bursting with imagination. Which is to say, it isn’t just that the film is long past expiration — so was 2021’s Chaos Walking, another too-late oddball YA adaptation that at least colored its overall failure with a modicum of intriguing artistic sensibility — but that director McG (maybe we’ve found the problem) seemingly fails to realize that the YASFF films that came before this were based on novels that came after, and does absolutely nothing to zhuzh up the cardboard cutout baseline that those other franchises had already built upon. The whole thing feels like the genre’s full catalog was fed to AI, and Uglies was spit out. Like putting a wig on a skeleton.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s visual design. When not trading in sub-PS2 graphics or treating the contrast of autumnal nature scenes with mech-tech urban infrastructure like the most mind-blowing of juxtapositions, McG and crew conceive of society’s pretties in bizarrest of terms. Take Peris, for instance. Stokes is a handsome actor to begin with, and the way Uglies makes him “prettier” is to make him look like the Human Ken Doll, or like if one of the Lost Boys was spray-painted to look more ophidian. If one were to be exceedingly generous, the uncanniness of these appearances could be viewed as commentary on the proliferation of cosmetic surgery culture across previous class divides, but then there’s the issue of inconsistency in presentation: some, like Stokes, embody what could only be called an aesthetic of Reptilian Mattel; others look ready for some JCPenney glamor shots; others just look appropriately dolled-up enough for a Negroni Sbagliato and some oysters. But even for viewers who aren’t overly distracted by the sum eyesore that Uglies is, there’s simply nothing much else to hang onto at all, unless one is moved by generally idiotic lines like “save your friend, save us all.” There’s no exploration of any connection between free thought and cultural capital; no survey of the racial implications of cosmetic alteration (despite The Smoke’s founders being Black); no study of institutional interference, whether that be governmental or commercial, in targeted stunting of adolescent identity development. Instead, all Uglies offers is the blandest of body positivity and self-love messaging, devoid of any of the camp, romance, or visual spectacle that make such tween-facing, platitudinous films palatable in any measure. Perhaps the sequel signaled at film’s end will be better, when it hits streaming services in 2044.
DIRECTOR: McG; CAST: Joey King, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes, Brianne Tju, Laverne Cox; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: September 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
