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

I genuinely think the Hunger Games books are some of the best genre fiction to come out of this century, and that author Suzanne Collins told a masterful story about capitalism, propaganda, and war theory in a way that’s accessible for younger readers. So I’m constantly defending the YA dystopian genre, and pushing back against the reputation it got for being overly dramatic, unrealistic, and full of needless love triangles set against gimmicky action sequences. Movies like Netflix’s adaptation of Uglies make that defense so, so taxing on my soul. 

Based on Scott Westerfeld’s 2005 series-launching book of the same name, and starring Joey King (The Princess) and Laverne Cox (Orange Is the New Black), Uglies is full of slick yet bland CG, stilted acting, and a plot that plays into all the lazy tropes 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 movie’s themes might have been passable in 2014, but the whole project feels so out of touch in 2024.

[Ed. note: This post contains setup spoilers for Uglies.]

Uglies takes place in a future world where everyone gets mandatory plastic surgery at age 16 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 get her surgery and become a Pretty, like her best friend Peris (Chase Stokes).

While waiting for her birthday, Tally meets and befriends rebellious Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about an underground resistance group in the wilderness. Shay runs away to join up with the rebels, and the city’s leaders enlist Tally to find her and take down the renegades. But as Tally lives among the rebels, she starts to learn that there’s a hidden cost to being a Pretty. Oh, and she’s also smitten with the rebel group’s fearless leader, David (Keith Powers). 

The biggest problem with Uglies isn’t necessarily that it’s a bad adaptation; it’s just an adaptation that feels so dated, it’s almost like a parody. The original novel actually came out years before The Hunger Games really launched the dystopia fad. So a lot of its tropes — a rebellion led by a suave teenager; a futuristic city where everyone is glamorous and beautiful, save for our scrappy heroine; a society built around divisions of people with Capitalized Adjective Names — actually predate the rancor they eventually drew. But in the time since the Uglies series was a chart-topping bestseller, the frequency of those tropes has become the chief evidence for YA dystopian naysayers.

While Uglies did a lot of these overdone plot elements first, in 2024, the story feels dated and derivative. And the movie has little to offer beyond what’s on the page. The acting is overwhelmingly stilted, though some of the characters’ relationships are more interesting than others. Shay and Tally’s friendship, born out of sneaking away from their dorms together, is compelling. But Tally and David’s romance feels awkward and almost like a genre obligation. It doesn’t help that while 25-year-old King is already pushing the limits of looking like a scrappy 16-year-old, Powers is 32 and looks it. In fact, aside from King, all of the “teenager” characters are showing their actual ages (late 20s to early 30s), which makes the insistence that they’re all freshly 16 really weird. 

Visually, Uglies is completely uninspired. The nameless futuristic city is so generic that it feels like a default 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 whatever high fashion the Prettys are supposedly wearing. The only unique set-piece is the rusted remnants of a theme park where Shay and Tally sneak off to ride their hoverboards, but it’s only used briefly. (And even though the Uglies book did it first, a ruined Ferris wheel was a big set-piece in Divergent.)

There is a deeper thread in Uglies, one that could take Westerfeld’s groundwork about conformity from the 2005 novel as a base, and use it to actually say something interesting about Eurocentric beauty standards. That theoretical version of the movie might join the current conversation about cosmetic influencers, plastic surgery, and celebrity culture. But Forman, Taylor, and Anderson don’t engage any deeper than the surface level of the original story, and McG makes no interesting choices in bringing it to the screen. Uglies winds up being yet another uninspired, forgettable entry in the deluge of YA dystopian movies that make my passionate defense of the genre such an uphill climb.

Uglies is out on Netflix now.