In an early scene of Uglies, directed by McG, Tally Youngblood (Joey King) stands in front of her bedroom mirror, her mouth in a hard line, her face resolute. She inspects her cheeks and squinty eyes, the namesake of her Ugly nickname: Squint.

“Mirror, make me Pretty,” she instructs, dull but nervous. We can imagine she’s asked this before, perhaps every day.

“Sure, Tally,” the mirror responds, then overlays Tally’s mirrored face with an enhanced “morpho” version of her own: clear skin, blonde-hued hair, and golden eyes.

It’s a mask you might see wielded by any modern social media influencer or celebrity with plastic surgery. Cat-eye makeup, plump lips, soft but defined jawline. “Perfect.” Pretty. 

Uglies takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where at 16 years old, characters like Tally undergo a physical and biological enhancement surgery that makes them Pretty — healthy, happy, skin glowing, and eyes whatever color you want them to be. Drawn from Scott Westerfeld’s 2005 novel, the movie follows Tally as she uncovers the inevitable secrets of her comfortable world.

Before this scene with Tally, the film’s prelude is more blandly efficient than the talking robot mirror. A ridiculous documentary-like sequence of glossy environments and science labs carries us from then (a climate-crisis world where humans destroyed themselves) to now (in the wake of destruction, a new society emerges). This familiar post-apocalyptic preface establishes the Pretty-Ugly stratification that purportedly dissuades discrimination on one’s appearance, as everyone receives equal access to the Pretty treatment. But as Tally will discover, things aren’t what they seem.

I deploy that overused line with a wink; in a Young Adult dystopian drama, of course, things won’t be what they seem to be. But that predictable formula, though comforting to YA fans, is also the issue strangling Uglies. Westerfeld’s first novel in the four-part Uglies series occasionally probes the tension of that trope with compelling plot turns and characters, and the film is a delightfully faithful adaptation of these strong aspects. But it also grips unflinchingly to its worst parts.

Released on September 13 to Netflix, Uglies lacks the vigor and thrills of other golden age YA book-to-films adaptations, a comparison we might easily draw for the book’s standing among the sagas that defined young fan culture in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Uglies stands most obviously in the shadow of The Hunger Games, itself celebrated for its polished and often strictly faithful film adaptations.

Yet Hunger Games fanatics packed into those midnight showings just a few years after the books came out. When the lukewarm adaptation of author Suzanne Collins’s prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, hit theaters late last year, it did so to a mix of nostalgia for the original series, as well as excitement for how director Francis Lawrence would reproduce Collins’s work once again. Equally, too, were fans enthralled to hear that Collins would publish another prequel; a film adaptation is already scheduled to be released in 2026. 

Uglies, then, often feels as if it has arrived at the wrong cultural moment. It was first optioned in 2006, shortly after the book was published, but here we are, 12 years later. The dystopian landscape feels well trodden—neon-lighted, CGI-muddled cityscapes yield eventually to the relief of dense, leaf-patched forests—and the lovesick teenagers are stuck in a romance trope explored more effectively elsewhere. (In the book this emotional arc feels even more tired, but the film thankfully condenses it.) 

Even the trials that Tally faces—a journey through the outskirts of her city on a hoverboard to find the Smoke, a colony of former Uglies that left the main city to forge a life of their own—are lackluster compared to other YA protagonists’ adventures.

Meanwhile, the characters affect their stilted dialogue with all the ease of actors forced to relay a story slotted for another decade, while the social commentary fails to state anything beyond that we should obviously not apply unilateral beauty standards and allow people to live freely, as they choose.

 

Well, sure. But what else? How could Tally’s fraught and conflicted affection for David (Kieth Powers), leader of the Smoke, compare to those tender moments of other YA novels, such as in Catching Fire when Peeta hands Katniss a pearl plucked from an oyster on the shores of that year’s games? That gift conveys both his deep love and devotion and inescapable grief—that within the violence of their own post-apocalyptic world, they can still uncover a shimmering kernel of beauty. 

Even with its occasional moments of triumph, that one pearl, dark and glistening in the palm of Katniss’s hand, contains all the emotional significance absent in Uglies.

Review Courtesy of Arleigh Rodgers

Feature Image Credit to Netflix