Netflix’s Uglies is everything wrong with the YA dystopian genre

I truly believe that the Hunger Games books are some of the best genre fiction to come out of this century, and that author Suzanne Collins masterfully told a story about capitalism, propaganda, and war theory in a way that is accessible to younger readers. So I’m a constant defender of the YA dystopian genre, fighting back against the reputation it’s gotten for being overly dramatic, unrealistic, and full of unnecessary love triangles versus gimmicky action sequences. Movies like the Netflix adaptation of Ugly make that defense like this, So burdensome to my soul.

Based on the 2005 book of the same name by Scott Westerfeld, which launched the series, and starring Joey King (The Princess) and Laverne Cox (Orange is the new black), Ugly is filled with slick-but-boring CG, stilted acting, and a plot that plays on all the lazy tropes that YA dystopian novels are known for. Director McG and screenwriters Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, and Whit Anderson are about 10 years too late to the table: this film’s themes may have been passable in 2014, but the whole project feels so dated in 2024.

(Editorial note: This post contains setup spoilers for Ugly.)

Ugly is set in a future world where everyone at the age of 16 undergoes mandatory plastic surgery to become “Prettys”, the most beautiful versions of themselves possible. They live in a glamorous city where all they do is party and have fun. Tally (King) is a 15-year-old who dreams of the day she can have her surgery and become a Pretty, just like her best friend Peris (Chase Stokes).

While waiting for her birthday, Tally meets and befriends the rebellious Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about an underground resistance group in the wilderness. Shay runs away to join the rebels, and the city leaders enlist Tally to find her and defeat the renegades. But while living among the rebels, Tally begins to learn that there is a hidden price to being a Pretty. Oh, and she’s also in love with the rebel group’s fearless leader, David (Keith Powers).

The biggest problem with Ugly is not necessarily that it is a bad film adaptation; it is just a film adaptation that feels so dated, it is almost a parody. The original novel actually came out years before The Hunger Games really kicked off the dystopian craze. So many of the tropes — a rebellion led by a suave teenager; a futuristic city where everyone is glamorous and beautiful except our warrior heroine; a society built around people who capitalize adjectives — actually predate the resentments they eventually provoked. But in the time since the Uglies series became a chart-topping bestseller, the frequency of those tropes has become the go-to evidence for YA dystopian critics.

While Ugly While many of these overblown plot elements were previously lacking, by 2024 the story feels dated and derivative. And the film has little to offer beyond what’s on the page. The acting is overwhelmingly wooden, though some characters’ relationships are more interesting than others. Shay and Tally’s friendship, born from sneaking out of their dorm rooms together, is compelling. But Tally and David’s romance feels awkward and almost genre-obligatory. It doesn’t help that while 25-year-old King is already pushing the boundaries of looking like a combative 16, Powers is 32 and looks it, too. Aside from King, all of the “teen” characters are shown to be their actual ages (late 20s to early 30s), which makes the emphasis on the fact that they’re all just 16 seem really awkward.

Visual, Ugly is utterly uninspired. The nameless futuristic city is so generic it feels like a standard Windows XP screensaver, and the wilderness where the rebel group hides out is also deeply uninteresting. Nothing about the costume design stands out, not even the high fashion the Prettys are supposedly wearing. The only unique set piece is the rusted remains of an amusement park where Shay and Tally sneak off to ride their hoverboards, but it’s only used briefly. (And while the Ugly book did it first, a destroyed ferris wheel was a big set piece in Deviant.)

There is a deeper thread in it Uglyone that could take Westerfeld’s groundwork on conformity from the 2005 novel as a basis, and use it to actually say something interesting about Eurocentric beauty standards. That theoretical version of the film could connect to the current conversation about cosmetic influencers, plastic surgeryAnd celebrity cultureBut Forman, Taylor and Anderson don’t delve deeper than the surface level of the original story, and McG doesn’t make interesting choices in adapting it. Ugly turns out to be yet another boring, forgettable entry in the flood of YA dystopian films that make my passionate defense of the genre such a tall order.

Ugly is now available on Netflix.